Friday, October 29, 2010

It's Alive!

After the suitcase incident, my desktop has been broken for the last six months. Earlier this week I replaced its motherboard. When I tried booting, I was disappointed to hear that it was still just beeping error codes. However, the error codes this time indicated a memory problem (which is different from the beep codes I was hearing before). I identified the damaged stick of RAM and removed it. Finally my computer seemed to boot normally, except that it unexpectedly turned off about 30 seconds later. I identified this problem to be due to the heatsink not attaching properly to the CPU. I ordered a new heatsink from Ebay and it arrived today. I just put in the new heatsink and the computer seems to be functioning normally. yay. In total, transporting my desktop in a suitcase destroyed the motherboard, one stick of RAM, and the CPU heatsink.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Art Gallery Problem

My art gallery game now has seven levels. Designing challenging levels is surprisingly difficult. Today I implemented mirrors which reflect the guard visibility polygons (seen in the screenshot above). Hopefully mirrors will allow me to create harder levels.

Sunday, October 03, 2010

Art Gallery Problem

I was looking through Wikipedia's list of NP-complete problems to try to come up with an idea for a game. A few of the problems on the list have already been made into games. I thought the art gallery problem might make an interesting game. My research on Google suggests that it has never been adapted into a game before. I spent the day implementing the game and have posted it online here. So far I have only made four levels but I plan on adding more soon.