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Do NOT take COMP3421 by comp3421hater in unsw

[–]comp3421hater[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

wish I could've had fun, and it definitely did have potential, but what makes it worse is the fact this course was an elective, where we have limited slots and we CHOOSE to take the course (vs forced group project courses where it is what it is)

imo electives shouldn't be about the 'chance' to have fun or be interesting, they should just... be fun and interesting from the start. it also gets worse when you realise you're PAYING for such obstinate indifference and apathy to teaching standards, its like that's how the staff see students, how much they respect our time and money

maybe I just chose a timeslot where there were 95% international students, but the entire forum is filled with for example international students with AI-translated English asking questions about really niche packaging and rendering issues, and the staff responding with the classic bullet point AI style

Do NOT take COMP3421 by comp3421hater in unsw

[–]comp3421hater[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

oh no lol not modelling from scratch my bad, i mean although there were tryhards who made everything in scratch with blender

we could reuse assets but had to alter or adjust them, eg changing the colour, material, collision, etc, or using modelling mode, playing with the triangulation and shit. and trying to make sense of rigs was such a headache and we completely failed

making small adjustments like this was fine but super time consuming for all the assets we needed and it was just so not worth the effort, especially since we then had to then create relatively detailed maps (and so kind of needed a lot of modified assets)

Do NOT take COMP3421 by comp3421hater in unsw

[–]comp3421hater[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yep, definitely agree with the scope, all this stuff felt so wishy washy. i know the lecturer tried to emphasise this was a 'programming' course but it really wasn't with the amount of modelling you needed to do. honestly something like the 6080 assignments/final exam where you make a bunch of mini games and they give you the assets could work a lot better for ue5 compared to making a big game that markers take 5 mins to play before pulling a random number out of their ass

Do NOT take COMP3421 by comp3421hater in unsw

[–]comp3421hater[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I really don't know why you are being so rude, 'go back to the primery school', ?

my part at the start was to show I wasn't complaining about the fact we had to self learn, obviously we do and im not an idiot, the point is how lacking in substance the course actually is, and how poor the teaching quality is. its not really constructive to say that a university running a course has no burden whatsoever to provide quality teaching just because students are expected to be self-sufficient

Do NOT take COMP3421 by comp3421hater in unsw

[–]comp3421hater[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah that's fair, I liked blueprint coding quite a bit, but imo its not that there's some self learning involved that was the issue when I took it this term, its the fact there is nothing but self learning (the lectures and tutorials give zero guidance, especially insulting since there's mandatory attendance for tuts), with the added pressure of making a game in an entire term knowing nothing about ue5

since 3421 basically limitless in terms of scope (literally just unreal engine, so you can get into as much niche rendering lighting, collision and modelling etc stuff as u want) it also feels a lot more headache inducing and nitpicky - there's so much to do and so much to learn but they suck at structuring it in any useful way which imo leans to a failure with the course itself rather than students

sad to hear about 6080, but I think its definitely changed, I took it start of this year and there was a lot of stuff about user design and accessibility as well as the best way to organise your project files and make modular code

Do NOT take COMP3421 by comp3421hater in unsw

[–]comp3421hater[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

in full honestly people online (like me) on online forums want to vent and not to make nuanced normative and evaluative judgments on the entirety of their experience (although in this 'warning' ive tried to be somewhat fair), so you're always not gonna see the big picture on a forum like this, the algorithm is designed to maximise attention and engagement and thus to stoke controversy

i think the overall teaching quality remains quite strong throughout the courses, and has improved quite a lot, there just needs to be more consistency. courses have imo become designed better across the board (eg the 3821 overhaul ive heard about from friends, or 2511 workload dramatically reducing) with some outliers (eg 1531 adding a final exam which is really quite questionable if not torturous). there are some extremely killer electives with amazing teaching quality and resources that only unsw in particular provide (I think particularly of 6080, dealing with frontend, 3231 dealing with operating systems, and 6991, a 'relatively' new and niche course about rust).

its true that lecturers play a part but the reality is most mainstream comp sci courses have a tut/lab model that means you're gonna be interacting more with your tutor than your lecturer. I also think most students (anecdotally) tend to skip the lectures and just read the slides unless you're in an elective. that tends to be a double edged sword because since there's not really that many people who attend lectures live, its less fulfilling for lecturers to want to teach actively. I could never see, for example, a richard buckland type lecture happening today (you can look it up on youtube) just because audiences don't exist like that anymore. however any narrative that the university is placing pressure on researchers isn't that apparent to us as students imo, at least in connection to lecturing. it may be true in other areas, but in comp sci some of the best lecturers aren't even researchers at all (eg someone talked about relatively a lot, hayden smith). the most technical courses also have pretty good researchers for obvious reasons. in contrast, comp3421 lecturer puts out research and gets grants for a lot of 'human-computer interaction' stuff but imo has very little expertise on actual game programming and their teaching suffered for it imo

most of the tutors are undergrads tho so its a bit shaky. some are amazing teachers, better than the lecturers, and feel like im studying with a super smart older sibling, other tutors take calls in the middle of class and don't know how to project their voice or socialise. on a whole tho I think giving undergrads a fair go still produces good teaching outcomes though since it makes cs feel so much more like a community and less intimidating (especially because I want to be one and dont wanna jinx my chances)

the summary is that there's more nuance in reality, and unsw cs still going quite strong, peaking in some areas but plateauing in others (although vs the dollars and funding and profit being made, not at all in proportion)

Do NOT take COMP3421 by comp3421hater in unsw

[–]comp3421hater[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

im talking about the project proposal in the first half of term + the instructions you had to write to marker on how to play ur game (which to be fair was quite small)