I'm almost done with my Senior Project (Computer Science). Yay!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m working with a friend/classmate of mine on a senior project. Unlike the engineers, Computer Science students only have 1 semester in which to do their projects, so we’re a bit more limited in scope.

Our presentation is this Wednesday, where we’ll present what we’ve done, what we’ve used, do a demonstration, etc.

So what have we done? We’ve made a 3-dimensional model of the solar system. :slight_smile: It’s from scratch; we’re using OpenGL with C++ (well, just C for all intents and purposes). Everything is to scale (except in what I call the “biggerfied view”, where the planets are really enlarged so you can see them a lot better) in size and distance and everything rotates at the correct speeds relative to each other. There are thin red lines for each orbit path and very dark blue lines (so they’re not too jarring) for each AU of distance, so it’s really showing how spread out the outer planets are.

There are pop-up windows (coded from scratch) for each planet/moon system that has tabs for different information (one tab is for basic stats, another for fun facts, etc) that are accessed by right-clicking your mouse.

The only things left that we need to finish are having a free-roaming camera (we can already zoom in and out; now it’s just a matter of keys that will rotate the axes as well) and finishing up the views (how close to start at for the inner system view, etc).

There are things we really wanted to get to, but didn’t have time. We want to eventually add more things in our own time, after we get our grade, like texture-mapping the spheres so they look like planetary surfaces instead of just, well, colored balls. We also have cheated for time’s sake and have just done circular orbits for now and would eventually like to get actual elliptical orbits in.

It’s not the prettiest; it doesn’t look like some professional designer did it. The buttons/tabs are just rectangles of color, and the fonts are basic. But considering we’ve done it from scratch, I’m quite proud.

And in a couple days, I’ll actually be able to sleep. :wink:

2

That sounds pretty cool, although I would really like to have gone to school for engineering where you are.

At Pitt we had one semester to do Senior Design Project, so we built an MP3-CD player. Then while we were messing with it, after it was all finished and working and stuff, we broke it by accident in one of those typical engineering ‘We can make it better.’ moments.

3

Did you make it better?

4

One of the team members who name I will not speak (not catsix) rendered the mainboard totally inoperable. We couldn’t afford another one, because we were but poor college students who had to self-fund our Senior Design projects, so the whole thing was scrapped in April of 2000.

Maybe we shoulda done like the OP and done software, because if we messed up the code we could have re-done it.

Anyway, I don’t wanna take away from his thread, where he deserves many kudos for completing what was obviously a very difficult task. Even those CS slackers* work real hard sometimes.
*Just a little good natured ribbing from a CoE to a CS. Mods, don’t smite me.

5

Very cool. My senior project (also using OpenGL with C++, good to see the technology hasn’t outrun me yet) was a smoky pool hall. God I spent hours on that thing, getting the smoke right, making sure the balls didn’t sink into the table, things like that. It’s fun to discover little shortcuts like using the pool cues to also hang the lights. Seriously, I spend close to 100 hrs/mo on that thing and my professor looked at it for 5 seconds. I felt cheated. I also wish I had saved it.

So, zweisamkeit, where’s (0,0,0)? The center of the sun?

6

Hee, I sure am a slacker, but I have to work my butt off in Comp Sci (I’m more naturally a [human] languages, literature, etc person). Programming always intimidates me; I’m okay once I have stuff started, but staring at the blank page scares the sh*t outta me (oh, and I’m a girl ;)).

Yep, (0,0,0) is the center of the sun and the default view (before you can change the rotation and zoom in/out) is looking top down. I’ll admit I’m mildly annoyed because my project partner made a couple changes to my code without telling me or showing me what it was; now my orbit lines aren’t displaying right (dotted/dashed lines instead of solid lines) and I can’t figure out what he changed. :mad: I’ll just gripe for a minute when we meet today. :wink:

7

It’s just an old joke from when I was back in school to be a CoE. The CoE department considered everyone in the CS department to be a slacker, or else they’d have been engineers. :wink:

Your project sounds really interesting though. Sorry for mistaking you for a guy. Still an occupational hazard from my days in the CoE department where the male:female ratio was 10:1.

8

That does sound pretty cool, and not exactly a small undertaking. Congrats on making it through.

Heh. Ran into that at a school where the student body was damn near 2:1 female:male, and I still managed to get a class with all guys.

9

Hee hee. It was extremely odd to graduate from an all-girl high school and go to a university that specialises in architecture, engineering and sciences, where the guy to girl ratio in Architecture is about 3:1 and the guy to girl ratio everywhere else (honestly, the College of Architecture is pretty much set apart from the other colleges that, while different, blend together) is about 7 or 8:1. Even in my humanities classes (there are a few of us Humanities majors here*), where the vast majority of the majors are female **, at least 2/3s of the class are guys.

Our presentation is today! :: crosses fingers :: I just have to finish up the slides, comment the code more and see if there are any bugs that magically show up.

  • I’m a dual major, Comp Sci and Humanities.
    ** So, y’know, like 8 out of 10 or so people. :wink:
10

CVS is your very, very, very BEST friend!