What's Happening?

I have kind of put a temporary halt to development while I finish a piece of course work for my OU course which has to be finished by the fourth of September. The course work is based around Threads and server applications. I completed everything but the last question which is based around servers and is worth 45% of the total mark for the piece. I'm already having trouble with this course work, one of the thread questions has completely thrown me and, although I have managed to answer it, my answer is an incredibly ugly solution.

While I'm on the subject, I thought I would have a quick dig at the Open University. I'm finding a lot of their programming courses very easy. At the moment I have studied M150, M255 and am studying towards M257 and am thinking about studying M263 Building blocks of software which seems like the easiest course of the three mandatory level two courses (which isn't really what I want to do). If I had my choiceI would skip M263 and save the thirty points for another course that would teach me something else more complicated, as at this point doing the course seems like a step backwards.

My other problem is that the Java courses are all based around small programming exclusively, which gives the student no experience at larger scale development. I would like one larger Java course worth more points - say 90 or 120 - that was based around developing one large program.

Another major problem is that the OU courses seem to be centred around Java programming and rarely look at other languages. I have done one course that was based on C++ but did not go into any depth on any of the more advanced aspects of the languages (pointers, for example). Ideally I would like to learn Java, C++ and some assembly language stuff.

I know the level three courses are a lot harder but they are still based heavily on Java and I have the maths courses to look forward to. I am actually quite scared of doing maths stuff as I'm rubbish at it. At the moment I am working through all of necessary computing courses and then I plan to jump across to the maths based stuff once I've finished.

A quick jump back to the development: I've added more menus (although I'm worried about the way I built the class). My solution will only be useful inside my program and I'm tempted to spend some time developing a full blown re-usable class that would lay out menus in the way I want. Also I've begun thinking about mouse support and how I am going to accomplish it. Another problem is that two use multiple menus and I have implemented numerous keyboard listeners to deal with them all (which I think I'm going to get rid of, although I'm going to still have two: one for inside the game and a second for all the menus).

The menu problems got me thinking about my objectives for this project. I have two main objectives: The first objective is to develop a piece of software that I can use to show my programming skills for potential jobs and bragging rights; the second is just to have a functioning program and as an exercise to see if I can make a full blown functioning program. They objectives don't seem to run parallel - the first objective pulls me towards taking my time and planning out each stage carefully and working out the specifics of my program before starting; the second just causes me to brute force everything and work as quickly as possible. At the moment I am sticking with the second.