Clarification from Tutorial

During our informal tutorial, I pointed out that a position (VPOS) was indeed available to be passed in to a pixel shader.  However, it is not the vertex's position as I may have said or implied, but rather the pixel's position on the screen.  If you wanted to know where that pixel would have been in the 3D world, you would indeed need to "cheat" by passing the information in some other way (possibly using texture coordinates, as the prof was suggesting).

Give Your TA Feedback

A few TA's in SCS (myself included) are participating in voluntary feedback through the TA Mentorship program.  The idea is to collect your thoughts on how we're doing both so we can improve and so we can have a record of our performance.

You can leave feedback on the participating TA's with this convenient online form.  I'd love to get your feedback about me. :)

Informal Tutorial Update 2

Room has been booked! Our informal tutorial will take place here:

HP 4325
12:00pm - 1:00pm
Thursday, November 10, 2011

Informal Tutorial Update 1

Hey all, I'm working on getting a room booked for our informal tutorial.  So far Thursday this week is the best day for most people, but our SCS seminar room is taken, so I'm trying for a nice room in the Math department.  If I can't find anything, I might try for something on the following Monday.  Watch this space and I'll update with a new post as soon as I know more.

Informal Tutorial: Help Pick a Time

Fill in this poll if you are interested in an informal tutorial to help you prepare for the second midterm:

http://www.doodle.com/pvy7tn9zn225fnmp

Please only fill in the days you know you will be able to attend.

Assignment 3 Marked

The third assignment is now marked and on WebCT.  Overall, most of those who attempted it did well.  A few general comments:

• There were a few assignments that looked suspiciously similar.  It might have been a coincidence (and it might have carried over from the previous assignment, and I just didn't notice it then).  But just in case it is not, please be more careful in the future.  Your best bet is to make a note of who you worked with on an assignment when you submit if you did indeed work together.
   
• There are still some basic code-related issues (so I made sure there were some marks for that).  For instance, I want to continue to get you to use good practices like making your class members protected or private, not using the 'this' pointer to access your members unnecessarily, and avoiding magic numbers.
   
• Please remember to clear all your warnings before submitting!
   
• And check whether you check your project file for this stuff before submitting.  You don't want to make your TA do more work than she has to before she even starts grading. ;)  I'll take marks off in the future if I have to modify it for you.

Two-Kings DirectX Tutorials

A student mentioned using this site for their texture tutorial, and since it looks useful I figured I'd share:

http://www.two-kings.de/

If you have any great DirectX resource websites, comment here or send them to me so I can share with everyone else as well.