13 days to go (I missed one in my daily reporting - blasphemous!) Above: a quick mockup of Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces on a cube. As you can see, the face normals are still slightly off; nevertheless, the general technique appears to be mostly working (although, as promised, the quads produced are predominantly non-coplanar.)
Why would I bother doing this? Simple - I'm going to make rocks! I'll start with a "random" cube formed by taking a point from each octant. Toss in a couple of Catmull-Clark iterations, perturb the face and edge vertices, and hopefully the end result will be vaguely boulder-esque. I'm also planning to implement stochastic OL-systems for trees and plants. (Trust me: although these sound impressive, they're actually quite easy to piece together.)
On the Real-Time front: we've finally discarded enough hubris to implement proper fail-fast error checking. We now panic on every buffer overflow and system call error with a very informative message detailing as much of the system state as possible. This approach - something that we should have implemented long ago! - has already located several serious issues. For each one we fix, two more pop up; nevertheless, not all hope is lost. If we can excise enough of these pesky critters by, say, four days before the project deadline, I still think we can cobble together a working demo.
Personal front: I've been aiming for a renewed adherence to my previous plan of proper sleep, decent nutrition, and exercise over the past three days. The result? My stress levels have plummeted, my mood has improved measurably, and I once more regard my projects as fascinating challenges rather than onerous obstacles.
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