Internship Experiences

Hi
This blog post details the entirety of my experience at Concentric Asia Pacific as an intern programmer.

The first thing that struck me when I entered Concentric for the first time was how relaxed the atmosphere was. I was expecting a large company to be fairly strict on such things as start time, lunch breaks, etc. My contact, Babak, actually started wrk at 10.30am each day. He had told me that they weren't too fussed about start and finish times, as long as the amount of hours required were put in. As a result, Babak also extended to me the offer to work 10 - 6 each day, instead of 9 - 5. I declined this offer, due to travel distance - leaving Concentric at 6 would put me getting home at 7.30pm at the earliest.

I spent the first few days at Concentric learning how to use a piece of software called 3DVia MP. It is a development engine that relies heavily on visual scripting of behaviours - and allows drag and drop importing of 3d graphical assets. It is quite an advanced tool for rapid applications development, and prototyping. However, it is a somewhat new tool, and as such the "building blocks" provided with it were only the most generic actions that are typically required for simulation / games software. Anything more specialised required actual text scripting, in a language called VSL.

After learning the ropes of MP, Babak set Amir and I to work on parts of their current prototype project / client pitch - a boat for the Australian Navy. The project was to create a 3D modelled replica of a boat that the Navy is purchasing, and allow the user to walk through it, and operate some of the controls. My task for this was to make the "davit" work - a contraption on the boat that lowers a dinghy into the water. Then, allow the user to drive the dinghy in first person view.

After a few weeks of work, this project was completed enough for us to move on to a new project - and a new piece of software. I was set to work learning how to use VirTools - the predecessor to MP. Being an older piece of software, it had a much more fully developed set of building blocks for the visual scripting system. As a result, we were not required to script anything in text.

The project at that point was to learn how to use the vehicle physics section of VirTools - which hooks up to the Havok physics engine. This is quite a complex task, as there are many, many variables to set. VirTools made it simple to actually set all the required data - however understanding what numbers to put in was much harder.

However, the internship - and this task - was cut short by Concentric going bankrupt. As a result, Babak told me to call Amir, and to let him know that we'd be better off simply returning to regular classes. Unfortunately, I was only able to spend 6 weeks at Concentric, instead of the planned 12.

Nonetheless, the internship was an interesting experience, and I learned a lot about prototyping - however none of this was true "programming", and I feel that I was perhaps a little buit misplaced.