Worus

The poker project continues to basically consume my life. I think about it nonstop. I’ve now got the game working such that each player works with the same deck, so cards aren’t drawn twice. The next step is to raise an event to instantiate the draw phase. This way, people can’t hold their hands until a second draw phase and, while holding their best cards, try to draw and get the same card twice! While right now it is impossible to get two of the same card in a current round, it is still possible to stagger one’s rounds from the rest of the players and cheat.

Tomorrow is Final Fantasy X-2 day, hopefully! It depends on whether or not the store will have it or not. It used to be that a release date really meant when it was available to the public. That has not been the case with the last few games. “Release date,” as it has been explained to me, has for some reason changed definitions to “ship date.” Hopefully Square Enix was a good company and shipped before the “release date.” I saw a walkthrough of the game in a magazine at work. While I didn’t read through in any detail, I saw all of these names that I remembered, like Guadosalam and Moon Flow. I’m way stoked.

This week is done with. I have officially completed almost everything I set out to do. A lot of it was completed later than thought, and there have been many late nights, but most everything was accomplished. As a matter of fact, I can only remember going to bed before 1:00 a.m. once this week. The coming weeks for this poker project are going to be somewhat hellacious. I’m hoping that it falls together like most things Markus plans do. Still, this is a term project, so I would say that the degree of freedom required may hinder this magical falling together. I can still hope.

I now have diagrams of how poker works. I’ve actually written out in a flow chart just how three players bet in poker. It’s basically a state machine with 26 states. I’m quite proud of it. I wish that I had had more time to do flow charts of other parts of this game so that I could be more prepared for the massive coding that must happen next week. Alas, this milestone is due in 20 minutes.

I have an exam in statistics on Monday. I’m somewhat scared. It took the class 40 minutes to complete one problem on the practice exam. It doesn’t help when the Evil Michael Skinner draws a duck under glass as the solution and then, when proceeding to try and do it mathematically, sets a mathematical expression equal to a chalk drawing of a pig and back equal to some mathematical expression. It’s things like this that give me a strong sense of admiration for Heike. If I were her, I don’t think I would be able to teach our class even if I did have all of the education in the subject that she does. She just seems to get that much shit from him.

The outlook for next week is to study all night Sunday for statistics, take the exam Monday, and code for the rest of the day. Tuesday, I plan to go to my myth class, work on theory of computing in a miracle session, and code for some of the day taking some time out to bask in Final Fantasy X-2, but not too much time out. Wednesday is Thanksgiving dinner at Beth’s, Thursday is set aside for statistics, coding, and a meeting in Des Moines at 8:00 p.m. Friday, I will present code until I present my prototype at 4:00 p.m. Oh, a joyous week of coding is ahead!