We've gotten right back in: this time we learned about ArrayLists. I agree, they are very useful, and it's good we went over them, but once again I already knew most of it.
Because of this and all that time over winter break, though, I've made some significant progress on several things.
First, my raytracer almost works. It'll reflect now, but it's also doing some strange refracting thing, as you can see with the addition of the green and blue checkered plane:
It will reflect with a sphere's normal just fine, however, but that's not absolutely correct physics. By the way, the spheres were just generated with a quick side program- it's neat what I can do now that I'm this far!
Besides the raytracer, just for fun, I made this one cold afternoon: an isometric tilemapper.
I can move the yellow selecting square around and create land and trees. However, I also can use a plasma fractal to generate a terrain map- like this one. I wonder what I could do with this... the next step in any direction would be to make moving sprites, but that takes a while to draw.
I made the images myself in the GIMP. Now that I'm getting used to that program, it's fun to use!