D&D Test

I don’t play table RPG but I do love Dungeons & Dragons-based games, like Neverwinter Nights, and TV series like Record of Lodoss War (ok, that’s an old one!). A friend of mine linked me to an interesting (and too long) test in order to assess what would be my characteristics if I were a D&D character. This is the result:

True Neutral Human Druid/Sorcerer (2nd/2nd Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength- 13
Dexterity- 11
Constitution- 13
Intelligence- 15
Wisdom- 16
Charisma- 14

Completely changing subjects, I left my small apartment near Unicamp campus Sunday and am now back in my parent’s house. I had to, since it was rented and I have only 2 months left until my legendary journey to Edmonton (xD). Last week was one of the strangest ones in my life, as I went out with friends, enjoyed as much time as I could with my significant other, and walked down well-known paths realizing everything will be completely different from now on. I’m one of those people that believes one needs to live things in order to fully comprehend them, and for some reason the craziness of what I’m about to do had not dawned on me until the point I actually handed out the apartment in which so many wonderful memories were created. I had the urge to cry, of course. And cried indeed

I don’t have friends with my approximate age here in São Paulo, since I was an antisocial of sorts in High School (although I had lots of people I maintained regular conversations with, for some reason I needed to put a huge personal space between me and others, and thus ended up not becoming particularly close to anyone. Obviously all friendships eventually faded when I moved to Campinas). As a consequence I feel somewhat lonely these days; I suppose I should get used to it, though, and just go on doing my own things.

And by “things”, I mean studying hard For example I’m reading this MSc. thesis these days. It’s awesome and is really inspiring me to pursue a similar field of research for my MSc, that is, compiler design targeted at GPUs, with specific GPGPU purposes in mind. Compilers are fascinating for me, as are all graphics-related subjects like data visualization, rendering algorithms, etc. So it seems like the perfect combo.

EDIT: Speaking of RPG games, I just found Final Fantasy Tactics‘s soundtrack collection on Youtube. From all the games I’ve played (and I’ve played many games) this one certainly is on my top-5 of favorites, and its epic soundtrack has no rivals. It’s a game with simple graphics but complex gameplay, in which you have to actually think in order to win, since enemies always have experience levels matching the main character’s levels (thus, fighting a long series of easy battles just to level-up until you become much stronger than the bosses is useless; each fight is a challenge in itself). Congrats for Square (which wasn’t Square Enix at the time) for pulling out such a fantastic masterpiece.

Oh boy.

I’ts been a loong while, hasn’t it? I’ve been pretty busy with my work at Overplay and trying to enjoy the now mostly gone holidays for a change. Today, however, I woke up to a horrid stomachache and couldn’t even go to work =/ And guess what: it was my fault. I had the unbelievable attitude of eating a sandwich for lunch last Thursday, and was so hungry I didn’t even pay attention that it was a bit too old to be healthy, if you know what I mean. As a consequence, I wasn’t too good during the weekend, but today really was the worst day. Anyway, it was well-deserved, now let’s see if I can take better care of myself.

As good news, my TOEFL scores are finally out and I got 113 out of 120! Swell! (I learned this word while watching the Revolutionary Road movie last week).
I believe my next post will be still this week, and I plan to FINALLY explain in a detailed way about that Optimum Path Forest-based pattern recognizer I told you guys I coded in November. I’ve been willing to write a small lecture about pattern recognizers and the OPF, specifically, for a long while, and now I’ve finally structured a good way to do it. So, just hold on your seats because this week will be great!

A toast to Distributed Systems!

So, Wednesday I was pleasantly surprised with my final grades on Distributed Systems. This one was a tough discipline, but the professor at least was good. I’m not exactly used to very high grades, *specially* not by the end of the semester, in which the lack of time to study to so many final tests ends up taking its toll (and making me enter a kind of machine-like state). The fact that I had such high grades on all my subjects, even though I was working far away from the college campus, gives me hope on rising my GPA enough till the end of next year. Maybe then I have higher chances of enrolling at U of A or UBC for a masters in Computer Graphics.

I also managed to write, yesterday, an extremely simple 2D raycaster on about 3 rock n’ roll hours, thanks to this great tutorial. The version I made is a slightly modified one, and the code uses pure OpenGL on VC++ Express 2008. However I still have to improve it and clean the code. Then if I have the time before going to U.S I’ll post part of the code here, explain how to do 2D drawing on OpenGL and so on.

CG apprentice for real!!

I’m in a very very VERY good mood today. To tell the truth I frequently am (unless I have tons of boring work with no time to sleep), but today I have the nicest reason ever: I was officially accepted to develop a scientific project in computer graphics, from next semester onwards! This means I’ll become a person that knows quite a lot about graphics programming in no-time, if I work hard enough. Which I plan to do, of course =D

The project general info can be found here. I will not be dealing with MTK right now, in fact the last step of the project will probably be fitting everything I code into the toolkit.

My first goal is implementing a way of, using sets of data from medical images and the like (that is, voxels with some info on them, like surface normals), “integrating” the data points to form known surfaces (like quadrics) and end up with a 3D object on screen. A way to do this is through direct volume rendering, and among the used techniques to render volumes I’ll be using raycasting, calculating isosurfaces with it. The algorithm to obtain approximated surfaces using the voxel sets is discussed on a recent article I must read. Of course, before all this I need to learn and implement a raycaster.

On the side, I will start reading Real-time Shader Programming. It seems to be a good introduction to shaders. And I will need to know the basics of GPU programming soon, as I’ve been told.

So, yeah! Lots of good stuff lined up for next semester, plus the travel to U.S next week. If only I managed to finish the Computer Architecture lab sooner…