/digipen/ - DigiPenitentiary

Honestly, it's not bad. There are amazing classes that define why DigiPen is the name in the industry that it is, like CS391 and the whole first two years with Mead and Volper (now that Chris was removed from 225). I think most of the RTIS complaining is from game classes, and not having any clue how things will be graded. Lucky the presentations do not mean anything to the final grade, it's just a hit/boost to morale and nothing more.

>>610
You're partially right. As >>611 says, the RTIS program is still pretty solid, aside from the whole teaching-yourself-GAM thing. But the trouble we have with the design program is just indicative of the school's greater problem: mismanagement and downright ADD.

DigiPen reminds me of myself teaching myself programming in high school. I'd have this cool idea for a zombie roguelike, and spend like a month doing nothing but working on it, thinking it's the coolest thing ever and getting excited about all the rad shit I can make for it. Then, after a month, ehh, I'm bored with that now… oh but man, it would be cool to try and figure out what it takes to make a FarmVille-like web game! Then another month passes, and I'm onto the next thing, etc. etc.

Seven years ago or whatever, DigiPen was all like "okay, game design is the new Most Important Thing," and spent all their time and resources building a game design program. They got like halfway to making it decent, then went "oh shit, you know what else would be cool? A sound design program." Then they spent a ton of money and resources getting that going, got most of the way to getting it where it needs to be, and went "oh shit, you know what else would be a good idea? Computer science degree programs that have nothing to do with video games." Then they put a bunch of time and resources into the BSCS and BSCE programs, which is fucking downright offensive to people who came here as BSCSGD and BSCSRTIS. Double so for the BSCSGD, because it's like, okay you fuckers, I thought you were a school known for game design and programming, and now you're talking up the non-game related degrees like they're the greatest thing ever? No shit a general BSCS or BSCE degree is going to get you an easier job than a degree program allegedly tailored to getting into the video game industry. But that's not why I'm here dickbag.

Then now, "you know what this school needs? A fucking mascot, so we can be like a real college." Once again, time, resources, etc. go into this shit "#wakethedragon" is attempted to be made a thing, like we're supposed to get hyped for this or something, because yeah sure, why not get hyped as a GD student? Your degree program is broken, the tweaks they make to it only make things worse each year, if you're a BAGD you know you're not going to get a job when you graduate but still you have to fool yourself every day into thinking that you're not wasting your time and money by being here, but yeah, holy shit, a new fucking mascot? GET FUCKING HYPE!!!

The whole thing just reeks of mismanagement, which would be fine if tuition was about a quarter of the cost, but it's not.

>>613
Apparently the mascot thing makes us qualify for a certain amount of scholarships. Doesn't really make much sense, but some colleges are filtered out as "minor" because they don't have a mascot.

>>613 print that post out and sneak it onto the student bulletin board.

>>613
You must be one of those divas that think learning how to make a shitty version of open GL in 200/250 and a shitty obj loader 300 makes you a special resource. Have you looked at the new degree? The only thing it is missing is the graphics crap, and math 300. Now go look at employment ads, how many want "reinvented the ideas behind rasterizing" as a skill?

You don't see where a class beyond 180's weak section on threads and the limited coverage in 260 would help? Fine, don't take 355.

But no, let's have the CS department, who probably know fuckall about design, do Jack shit while the BAGD program stays broken. Or maybe the solution there is to get Pushpak, Mead, and Volper working on it…

>623
Maybe I'm tired but I have no idea wtf you're trying to say. I read your post and I can't tell, do you agree with him? Disagree? What the fuck are you saying?

>>610
Senior RTIS here. Graduating to an amazing job offer. Most of my friends have awesome jobs they're graduating to as well. Very happy with the program.

>>613
I'm confused… Are you GD upset with the mismanagement on top of all your problems with the degree? Or an RTIS who likes the degree except for the mismanagement issue?

>>623
So is the CS degree just RTIS without the Graphics CS classes and MAT 300? What are they replacing it with? Are GAM classes intact?

>>629
Congrats on the offer! When I was graduating, there were some weak students that were still graduating (weak as in "couldn't write a keyboard input system"). Are these people still making it through?

>>639
Both, I'm a BSCSGD. The mismanagement is the core of all of DigiPen's problems, and the lack of coherency and usefulness of the design department is just icing on the cake for GD students.

>>639
> Are these people still making it through?
JR here, yes. There's somebody who has failed GAM200 twice and GAM300 twice. Why is he still here? I have no idea.

Out of curiosity was graphics shit back then? Patrick taught cs200 well enough that I can easily go home and do my work. Pushpak took over 200/250 when Patrick left to work for Microsoft and suddenly have no idea what the fuck is going on. God bless TAs that doesn't help and grade everything 100%.

>>639
>So is the CS degree just RTIS without the Graphics CS classes and MAT 300? What are they replacing it with? Are GAM classes intact?
Those graphics courses become more generalized classes where I think it matters. Networking, parallel programming, ui, and I forget what else. They can work on GAM projects except they're working tools and not the game logic itself is what I understand if you plan on working on a game team. Otherwise you're making random applications that they find reasonable. The sad part is you can easily switch degrees and GAM counts as PROJ.

In my opinion the normal CS degree is better than RTIS and if I wasn't a JR I'd switch, they promise anyone who is a soph they can graduate on time if they switch. Mainly due to new classes they have no professor and Volper is finding people. If I switch then I'm behind a year for a few classes which is tempting to switch still.

>>639
It's certainly possible and wouldn't really surprise me, but I don't know any people like that myself.

>>641

Graphics is… tricky. There's the teacher and there's the subject, and both need to be good to make the class good.

Personally, I did not find 200 and 250 very useful, because you would not end using the majority of it. 250 was useful for something; I had already taken both linear algebra classes, but this was the first time I applied it to code.

My problem with the classes is really the content–you take 2 years' worth of graphics classes, but what can you really demonstrate at all? Having a lighting theory class would have been nice to understand what you're approximating in 300; teaching you more than a basic Phong shader would have been nice too.

I guess, to answer in less words, there were some good and some bad teachers, and the content was interesting but not as useful as some alternatives could have been.

It's a pity to see the slight modification be a new degree; it would have been nice to have more focus-based branches (such as a graphics focus, a physics focus, AI, so on…)

Good to hear they have concurrency, that was a big missing class. The other two don't seem that important…

Are the CS projects team-based? One of the great things about DP was the ability to show how much you worked with other people; it would be a shame if the CS degree didn't require that.

>>650
Well yeah I there's the professor and the content itself. I personally don't believe the content we're supposed to learn is that great. Phong lighting? Sure that's neat, but does anyone really use it? Texturing and normal mapping? I'm 100% ignorant of graphics, but I believe that part of the assignment(s) itself was great. The refraction assignment I just simply didn't do since it wasn't explained very well and I'd pass with a B.. assignment is 17% and it was out of 110% if I remember. Being in 350 now, it's just.. I have to question it why? Why is this a graphics class? I guess models are graphics. Then there's the professor which uh.. I'll leave it at that.

I just don't see the 2 years of graphics being useful at all.

>Are the CS projects team-based?
Last time I remember, yeah. It's still very vague in what they want from CS projects at least again from what I last remember. GAM also has a new rule that you cannot do a solo project unless you have an absurdly good reason why.

>Good to hear they have concurrency, that was a big missing class. The other two don't seem that important…
More useful than the current graphic courses though and it won't be offered til next year unfortunately, but it is a course that I'm excited for.
So the main difference between RTIS and just CS
>RTIS
>4 semesters of graphics
>art requirements
>CS
>ui
>parallel programming
>networking 2(If you didn't remember, it's gameplay networking moreso than what the first course taught beyond asteroids.. well did before jeffjeff got fired)
>compilers
>advance databases
That's really the main differences with some general education. Like who gives a shit about art and the current graphics course. Current graphics needs an insanely overhaul imo.

>>669
So what you're basically saying is that the BSCSRTIS degree at DigiPen is somewhat useless for the real world, in that a more generic BSCS degree would be better?

>>669
You forgot non game AI. Last I checked 381 is in the new CS degree.
CS251, as the only graphics class.
MAT 340, Probability and Statistics in place of 300.
As you said, advanced databases (CS212) which requires the first one (CS211).
No art requirement.
Physics labs are required.
The other listed classes are:
UI/UX -CS325
Parallelism -CS355
Compilers and Interpreters - CS375

If anyone wants to look them up on the website for the official description.

>>669
People absolutely use Phong lighting. It's just that there are more lighting approximations than Phong, and Phong is based on a ton of assumptions, so it would be nice to have the base of what you're trying to simulate before you approximate it.

350 sounds different than when I took it; it was mainly spacial partitioning back then.

I think the graphics classes make you work on useful skills, but they feel more like a focus. If someone wants to focus on graphics, that's great, but IMO, if someone wants a different focus, they should be able to take that instead. If the issue is some useful underlying skill needs to be taught, that content should be moved to another class that all RTIS students would have to take. Also, for a focus, the content could do with more of a concentration on the current state of graphics.

>>670
From my own experience, RTIS is still pretty damn useful. Yes, graphics might not be relevant to every jr dev, but neither will UI, AI, databases, compilers, or networking. They COULD be. That's why I keep talking about being able to choose your own focus–even at a college level, you can specialize in your programming to make you better suited for certain positions.

If I were to think of one big thing RTIS missed, it would be reading other's code. On the job, a large part of my time is understanding how to do something in a codebase I don't know, or modifying the code of someone I can't reach out to for clarification. RTIS did not prepare me for this, and from the looks of it, CS does not offer any classes that help either.

>>674
Last year there was talk of doing different tracks inside of the RTIS degree. The unofficial word on why they just made a new program came down to the difficulty in accreditation of a track based program.

I think the code base thing was the idea behind the new 365 project. He wanted to do random teams with the entire project being traded to new teams at milestones. But too many students raised too much fuss over not getting to pick teams that it lost all of that.

>>674
>350 sounds different than when I took it; it was mainly spacial partitioning back then.

I was just being stupid, it is exactly that still. It's graphics, but eh I guess not the type of graphics I was expecting. I can see the usefulness of it after thinking about it, but eh I expected more from the last required semester.

>>698
Spacial partitioning is huge. Graphics, physics, game AI, audio, and possibly game networking all use it.

It is questionable that it's taught so late, and as a graphics class, though.

>>755

I'm not RTIS so I won't take those classes, but what are you talking about? I thought spatial partitioning meant, like, splitting levels into chunks and stuff. how does that apply to any of the other fields you listed?

>>756
I'm not him so take what I say lightly
>graphics
When you're drawing thousands of objects how do you do it efficiently? Split shit up and if you don't see a certain partition then you just saved a lot of calculations.
>physics
An object shouldn't need to check if it's colliding with everything, so split that shit up and see if it's colliding with another partition, is it? Check the sub partition until you find the object.
>AI
I'm not entirely sure here.. I'm thinking with RTS in mind, but want to keep your units not stacked? Partition them up.
>Networking
I'm just guessing here, in a MMO setting does everyone need to know what happened even though they don't see it? Partition shit up. Send updates to people who should know.

I just don't see why this is part of graphics as the last required course. I expected something more.. visual.

>>757
I mean, again, BSGD here, but I've done reading on rendering shit in 3D and it seems like one of the most basic things you can do to make a 3D environment is study how Doom, Duke Nukem, and Quake would partition their worlds up and render them appropriately.

We've hit the point in graphics classes where the tricky shit we're learning is shit I have no interest in learning as a non-graphics programmer. Also I am like 200% done with math. I would gladly swap out this last semester of graphics and math with another algorithms class, or a more advanced AI class. Other than that, seems pretty good. Had a few phone/in person interviews, all questions were things I had learned by sophomore year because mead and volper are beasts, and I just had to figure out how to wrangle the tech question until it looked like something from CS170

>>757
Nailed it with everything but the AI.

3 areas I can think of for AI:
Navigation, in large areas, tends to be partitioned. I don't think it uses the structures taught in class though, so maybe you can discount this one.
AI updating is not necessary for every object in a large world, so you want to cull the AI you won't notice.
Visibility checks matter in AI. How do you make a ray-cast as cheap as possible? Spacial partitioning.

You didn't list audio, but hopefully that should be self-evident too: you want to cull distant sound emiters since you won't hear them.

Basically take any problem. Does it only need to use a subset of game objects based on location in the world? If so, spacial partitioning can usually help.

>>759
Not sure what you're saying here. Are you saying that you were able to teach yourself what you needed, so there shouldn't be a class? Isn't the main complaint on this board that DigiPen should be teaching more instead of having student teach themselves?
Are you saying the class went too deep compared to what you'd need to use?

>>767
There's a definite need for some math in games, but 100% agreed students should be able to take other classes instead of graphics.
Job application stuff is something that sometimes pisses me off. Ideally, you have individual gates, and each gate narrows the candidates down, so you can narrow the riffraff with the 1st gate, remove the weak with the 2nd, etc.
Instead, the resume stage seems super-competitive, and once you're past it, in my experience, the interviews are much easier.
What I mean from this is even though you used mainly your Sophomore knowledge in the interviews, you skills from other classes might have had an impact on whether you got that interview at all.
Good luck on the job stuff; sounds like you're owning it!