CS373 Fall 2019: Brian Dyck

Brian Dyck
Nov 4 · 3 min read

What did you do this past week?

This past week I worked on my projects for all of my classes. For SWE my role was to mainly think of ways we can make our website look less boring. In Ethical hacking I started to work with my teammates to decide what we were going to do for the final project. In game tech, I created an A* algorithm class called AstarMap, and a GridMap in order to give AI’s fast and efficient path finding to resources and the player at any point in a match against the human player.

What’s in your way?

Currently, the lack of a creative mind when it comes to web-design has left the website’s boring factor still mildly boring. I or a teammate will need to have some creative breakthrough in order to actually make the website look less boring. While we have a working AI for my game tech assignment, I do still need to work on adding in some particle effects, and to the new game play elements being added in for the AI’s to work with.

What will you do next week?

Next week I will quickly finish up my game tech project, then move my focus to the SWE project. I will also be working on submitting the ethical hacking final project proposal, which will hopefully go over well.

What was your experience of SQL? (this question will vary, week to week)

SQL seems very straight forward. I was actually quite nervous going into this section in the class as I felt rather confident in my Python knowledge, but I had absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of SQL. However, despite my lacking prior knowledge, I found the calls and functions we have learned so far to be simple and easy to understand. I look forward to learning more about the language and its uses.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

This week my tip of the week not to be taken too seriously, but… well you’ll understand in a moment: Do not use pre-increment in for loops, and when things crash, and you don’t know why, comment out the line you’re breaking then comment it back in. Now to explain these bazaar tips; I have been working in a very interesting game engine, called “Godot.” Now, Godot has a very strong library with fantastic documentation, and it works quite well when used as intended. However, from the perspective of a programmer, there is one major flaw, Godot language is a scripting language, and therefore much too easy for a programmer to be using at The University of Texas at Austin. To compensate for the easy use of this script language, my professor decided that we will be building C++ modules for the lovely language that GDScript. The only issue is this is unstable at the moment, and some “bugs” that occur are not from my poor code, but rather the unique way it gets compiled under the hood. So, as I originally stated above, sometimes pre-incrementing will cause the program to crash at run time without any warning. Other times I can comment out a line of code, then comment it back in and everything just works and never gives me issue again. I suppose I am just using this as an opportunity to vent out about this, but it is what it is.

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