Start of the Holidays which is Basically Nearly the Same Thing as Before

Starting this week, I'm on an extended holiday until June. As being a lecturer, one of the major perks is that we are allowed an extended summer vacation until the next semester starts. How each lecturer spends the break depends on them. A number of lecturers would teach right through the summer. A number of them would be engaged in contract/external work. Some of them would be doing research. A number of them would go on extended holiday. To round up, a number of lecturers prepare for the next semester's course.

On my side of the story, during the summer semester, I am planning to spend most of my time brushing up my programming skills in the computer graphics field. Though many people complement me as being leading developer, I do find that complement rings hallow, and I have much to learn. So far I've been working on extending a game engine that I've used to include shader graphics. Right now, its looking quite good having adding a bloom filter, a flexible image filter system, and additional water based effects. What I usually like to say about it is that I managed to make a $150 dollar game engine look comparable with a $100k game engine LOL. Anyway, I've finished the first step of the project and I'm giving this core to my collegue to use it to create new games.

After that, I plan to take a dabbling on Physical Based Rendering systems which is an area of computer graphics. At this moment, I am quite intriqued by that concept, and I plan to spend most of the holidays to review and going deeper in that concept. Though Physical Based Rendering is usually ill-suited for game development due to its excessive calculation and slow speed, I am intriqued about exploring various optimization techniques that in hope in the future it might be feasible for real-time graphics. I don't think it would be a reality some time soon, but it is indeed a topic of challenge. As I'm planning to start my PhD somewhere the next semester, I reckon that if I had a head start on developing a core area for my future thesis it certainly would be beneficial.

Coupled with 3 other conferences to join during this period, I have to reckon that it is quite certain that this summer break would be busy just like any other typical day in my life :P