AZ peeps

I finally moved to Arizona and am looking for some local "gamedevors." I am currently residing in Cave Creek (North-West of Scottsdale) and plan on taking PVCC classes this summer and in 12th grade [after hours]. I am also looking into ASU's and UofA's course offerings, primarily C.S.-related, for after highschool. If you live in Scottsdale, Phoenix or anywhere else around this metropolitan area, I'd like to meet up with you, or at least chat about the opportunities offered in Arizona to C.S. enthusiasts like us. So far I've discovered: Fry's(or "Fri's?")--a gigantic consumer electronics / computer stuff store, and that's about it. I am enjoying the heat and I think it ironic that it's illegal to produce your own electricity, for instance, with a solar panel. If you'd like me to get more into the specifics about what I'm doing in the realm of gamedev, you'll have to post--no more boasting for me, I actually have to get something down now. Nevermind. Don't bother. I'll tell you what I'm working on during the brief strides between hectic school work. Right now, I'm musing on the topic of an object-oriented window handling interface in C++. When I'm done, it'll be as portable as glut, but glut is just too high level for me. Since I'm running MS Windows, I'll be implementing Win32 first. Next will be a BSP system of my own optimizations. And after that, I'll be working on my own geometry file format ( with maybe some BSP aspects included like in the Q3 format). I will not be using OpenGL lighting per se, but will be utilizing every graphics card's register combiners to do per pixel lighting (I think I'll have most trouble with this). A quick description of my BSPing: I will take the scanline approach and try to manipulate each pixel in the color buffer only once. Too sppeed up testing of the untouched fragments, I'll use another partitioning scheme (maybe quad tree or BSP). The only problem: I know there must be a trade off between partitioning to a fine, fine resolution and just drawing with brute force. But I don't know how to find that equillibrium without the trial & error testing method. Hopefully I will learn more of the "engineering" aspect of Computer Science in college. By the way, I meant to ask earlier in my post about the C.S. course offerings at ASU as compared to UofA. So, which Uni should I goto? Plz, if you could, give me some pros-cons--I know, I'm ordering the catalogs of both... [edited by - leinad on May 11, 2003 5:39:23 PM] [edited by - leinad on May 11, 2003 5:40:23 PM]