Scope and Revision History

The content, at pet.triquence.org, is a bit much for a single J-term course. We did not cover everything. A regular semester might be a better container.

Scope

Here's the pattern followed in the J-term course:

1. Worked through most of the 1D assignments. Made the Gui Controls and the Hollow Cars and Demos assignments optional.
2. Presented the Vector Class Module and the 2D Framework, but made the assignments optional. This makes a good weekend (or two or three) challenge for those students that have coding experience.
3. Presented the Multiplayer Demo (networking) assignment. This makes a very nice in-class demo where multiple students (with laptops) can connect their clients to the server which is rendering to a large projection screen in the room. But again, the development of the client/server files is a good overload assignment for students looking for more. However, this can be taken as a result and used by those that want multiplayer functionality in their game.
4. Then it was back to required assignments where the students learned techniques for embellishing their moving pucks to make them playable: rotating turrets, firing bullets (and the associated impulse forces), visual indicators of health, etc. All the assignments between the 2D Framework and the Perfect Kiss were required.
5. At this point, they started working on projects while I presented the material on Pybox2d. There are no required assignments here. A few students used this in the end for their projects, but most used our own 2D Framework.

Revisions

• June, 2019
  • Added topic on calculating pi with collision counting.
• May, 2019
  • Added a second video on the reversibility of the Perfect Kiss algorithm.
  • Code changes for demonstrating the reversibility of Perfect Kiss:
    • Refined the game loop to give the option to limit (clamp) the game loop FPS and set a corresponding fixed timestep for the physics engine calculations. "Shift-p" toggles in and out of fixed-timestep mode. The current FPS is used as the clamping limit and the associated fixed timestep. The clamped FPS is shown in parenthesis.
    • The "e" key sets all pucks to have elastic collisions.
    • The "z" key (as before) enables the perfect-kiss algorithm. Now it also sets all collisions to be elastic and displays a collision counter in the upper left corner.
    • The "r" key reverses the velocity of all pucks. "Shift-r" reverses the direction of time incrementation.
    • The "t" key starts and stops a general timer.
• November, 2016
  • Started translating the final assignment (A16c_2D_B2D_serverN) into JavaScript for running in a web browser using the HTML5 Canvas. See main page at triquence.org.
• January, 2016
  • Added the Raspberry Pi 2 page. Script revisions are discussed at the end of the RPi page.
• October, 2015
  • Added the pure-Python physics engine (a.k.a. string rendering; a.k.a. the one-pager).
  • Added this revision-history page.
    
• August, 2014
  • Updated the installation files in the zip.
    
• July, 2013
  • Added Vector Sandbox.
    
  • Added Perfect Kiss.
    
• June, 2013
  • Added conceptual drawings for the content in the PDFs.
  • Improved the documentation for the 2D framework and multiplayer-networking code.