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Yesterday I took that C programming test I mentioned as part of my application for a job to a game development company… and failed! *gasp* The test basically consisted of writing two functions. They said they hoped it would take three to four hours, five at the most. I wrote the first function successfully, but it took me four hours. I spent an hour on the second one, then just gave up. I’m sure I could have done it if I spent a five to six more hours. Designing the algorithms for the functions weren’t that hard (definitely a bit tricky, but not impossible… kind of fun actually), but doing the actual coding in C slowed me down a bit since I haven’t done it in a while. I guess it was a good refresher though. The functions used a lot of the “char” data type, which I just haven’t used much recently; I’ve been using Java lately (mostly because that’s what classes in college used, those traitors!) which I suppose has sort of spoiled me because it makes things like dealing with strings much much easier than the archaic way C deals with them.
My awesome desk
So, I guess I can’t have a job with that company! I wonder how often chars are used in the modern game development process? I really can’t imagine it being used much… so it’s too bad I blame them for my downfall. Anyway, I’m still keeping my eye open for game programming jobs that look interesting, and I hope they won’t test me too much on dealing with chars.
Anyway, I’m working on composing yet another waltz. Not sure what to call it yet, but it’s sounding good. I give a little excerpt in the podcast. I’m hoping to make it a part of my upcoming album, coming sometime in 2009, at least an hour of all new music… I hope.
And… oh! I joined TwitPic. Kind of like my Twitter account, but with pictures. In fact, I guess I should add links to those on the side. A fun way to use my camera since I don’t really go anywhere. I’m a hermit. And I don’t have any money. I’m in debt up to my eyeballs. Somebody help me.
Anyway, hopefully you won’t mind it if I just blather a bit on what I’ve been working on. I started out writing a book on melody, though I didn’t get much writing done at all; I mostly just planned out how I was going to analyze melodies. Then I started writing a computer program that could be fed melody information and spit out an “analysis” of that melody (“analysis” being mostly a collection of statistics). It was my intention to use these statistics in my book, but then I decided to try reversing the process. So I made my program take a melodic analysis and create a melody for it. That in and of itself isn’t special, it just gives you back the original melody you put in. But if you change that analysis around a bit, based on similarities of other melodic analyses (and some randomness), you get … new melodies! Or at least melodies that are variations of the original melodies. In other words, the more similar two melodies are, the easier they will mix. The more different they are, the more my program will just regurgitate one of them, after having been unable to mix them that well.