The dissertation

Wah.. it's been a while since I wrote something here. Ok some update:

I have been having problems with my friend with whome I wrote the dissertation, because she's been post-poning things and giving up on other things. This continued until a few days after my previews blog here, which was on May 8th if I remember correctly. I really tried all I could to motivate her, to make her work a little more, because honestly the main reason I teamed up with her was that she is a close friend of mine and that I knew she lack discipline enough to make it through all this alone, I knew it from the beginning and just wanted to help her. Even though I was painfully tired of everything.
Four days before the deadline for our submission of the last part and she still hadn't written the intro and although I was furious and totally disappointed at her I managed to keep myself calm and reason with her. Things didn't get better and we only had less than a month until the final submission had to be done if we were to graduate this year. So what I did is tell her to rest or something, she obviously had given up on everything and that is inacceptable for me. Ofcourse I was damn hurt by being forced to have such patience without being rewarded with a positive outcome, but there never was included in my plans to fail, not now when I'm so close to my graduation. What did I do? I continued alone ofcourse. I talked to the supervisor and he thought that I have to rethink everything and see what really matters, what I reallt wanted to write about, if it was fun. I had three weeks to compensate for 5 months and write a complete dissertation. Not to forget that I still had the final project to work with and my friend was a member of that group too and didn't work on that project either. She wasn't the only one. By that time two of six members were working fulltime on the project, me and the level designer who also did all the graphics except for the avatar.
My tasks were those that were my own plus those that should have been done by the other two programmers, but since they didn't do them, I had to. All my other friends tried to persuade me not to overload myself like that, after all I've done my part and would certainly pass the course. But I just can't handle undone things, I'm a perfectionist when it comes to calling things complete - I can't stop until I've reached a certain level of completion, which most often is set to flawless or something, resulting in me being "almost" satisfied with my work.

Anyway, I started aaaall over with the dissertation, searching for a smaller but clearer subject. I still wanted to write about AI in games because that's what I really want to work with in the future, and since one of my parts was about waypoints I've been watching a lot of youtube-videos revolving aroung waypoint systems and game AI, and one of them gave me the inspiration that helped me through the rest of May. The video was about the AI in Half Life 2, it's actually a really fun clip, watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DZX-Fq5N0I :D
I thought about it and rethought about it and all this during during the holidays. I started to search for references and everything I could get my hands on and whops! I found Lars Lidén's article about "Strategic and Tactical Reasoning With Waypoints", check it out: http://liden.cc/lars/WEB/Resume/Papers/2002_AIWisdom.pdf
Lidén is talking about how to calculate tactical and strategic positions and ways by using visibility tests between static waypoints.

That was my cure :) I surely had to reread it many times to understand all of it but I was very happy to have chosen the Logics course last year instead of going to the Narration-course, which I had been waiting for for two years! And so I started to write about it and about the analysis and all the background information needed. Ofcourse I had to read a lot of other references but that article became my main source of wisdom. During the following three weeks I woke up very early (8, 9 o'clock, and if you knew me the slightest you would know how early that is to me!) and studied all the time except when rapidly eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, and slept around 5 o'clock. Everyday! Oh I forgot, my mom forced me to take a shower once in a while.

But hey I managed to write an awesome, complete dissertation that even I, who's such a perfectionist, am satisfied with. :D :D
My supervisor must have looked surprised to receive my dissertation because time we talked I had three weeks and still nothing to finish, odds were kind of small to complete anything, whether it be the dissertation or the final project, to be honest.

I was allowed to make my presentation and "defend" it from all the critiques (which only could be done if my work was considered complete), and so did I. The examinator liked it and said it was ambitious and the opponents who critisized it said it was very interesting and well written. Of course I had to fix somethings, for example I was talking about tactics all the time, but never explained what "tactics" or "strategy" was :P I've fixed that and a few more things and now I'm totally satisfied with the paper, I really can't think of more things to add, change or remove from it. I've resent it and am waiting for the degree. Judjing from the initial points I got during the presentation I will get atleast a C, and now I'm excitingly waiting for the final degree - what will I get??? :D

Next blog I'm planning to write about how it went with the final project, but until then: take care!