Graduation.

[Weaver]

I was too busy for partying. I was always programming the next game in class, doing mathematical programming or studying computer architecture.

Sometimes I'd pull a whole nighter on doing a project, without any sleep, just so a project will get finished on time and working for a decent grade.

you sound like me! You do CS, comp eng or soft eng?

I do Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Computer Games Development in Carlow IT.

EDIT: It's an excellent course, and one I highly recommend for those that are looking into getting into the video game industry.

I'm doing Computer Science at University of Waterloo in Canada. Quite challenging, but I like the program a lot.

Nice! How many years is in it and what are the classes?

It's a co-op program so it's 5 years long. What that means is I do 4 months of school, then 4 months of work, 4 months shcool... etc. I don't get any summers off, but I do get to make money which is nice. Plus the work terms are related to CS. Right now I'm working at a company writing RFID software.

Anyways, the classes are pretty mixed. Once you get to the upper years like I am (4th year) then you get to really pick the interesting ones (AI, Graphics, Security, etc.). The first 2 years are really all prep. Basic compilers, lots of math, a hardware class, logic class. 3rd year you get some fun stuff like Operating Systems (write an operating system in a group of 3). It's a great program, just very very time consuming. I'm often tired and spend tons of money on sweet sweet caffeine.

Sounds pretty cool! Yes...Caffeine...is good.....

I just did my first year and we don't have a choice in our classes (because we're geared towards the video game industry, but can go to the software industry as well. Microsoft helped develop this course and they sponsor it).

My first year's classes were Applied Mathematics, Computer Architecture, Programming, Graphics and Computer Games. Basically we spent the year programming in C# and made a game on Game Maker Version 7 and a level on Quake II. We also had to do ASM 80X86 by modifying a skeleton code to fully implement Bresenham's line algorithm. The skeleton code could only make a line from the the first point being on the left/centre portion of the screen and the second point had to be a diagnol line from there.

I absolutely hate ASM.

Next year though will be interesting. Doing Programming, 3D Graphics and Audio, Data Structures & Algorithms, Games Engineering, Applied Physics and Human Computer Interaction. Should be interesting enough. Certainly looking forward to it. I'll be getting my results in three more days, so I can't wait!

That sounds pretty awesome!
HCI is a ton of fun, I think you'll enjoy that one

HCI sounds like a lot of fun! What would we normally learn in that one? Just the hardware that allows us to interact with the computer?

In Graphics we did a bit more then just learned graphical techniques and stuff, we also had to learn the different displays and how they work and how the controllers work on all the consoles and stuff like that. I gotta say, it was a lot of fun.

My favourite bit in Graphics though? In a graphics test we had to Rotoscope Frodo. I Rotoscoped that bugger of what I really thought of him, making him look like the git he is.

Well HCI could be a lot of things. It could be an entire theory class, the theory of how people interact with computers (eg, what an affordance is) but hopefully they'll also let you do your own project like designing your own interaction mechanism or something like that.