Term Project Milestone 10: Post-Mortem

        

Brief Overview:

For our project, Echoes of the Mind, I primarily worked on the Alpha and Delta environments, programming the object interactions and networking for both, as well as creating the 3D assets for the Delta environment.

Delta:

I worked on the implementation and programming of the orb spawning, orb falling, orb release, and networking those events across clients. I created the main core, tubes, and root models for the Delta environments, as well as the orb animations for each tube. I also added the particle effects for the core and orb release.


Alpha:

I worked on the implementation and programming of the book spawning, book interactions with the lecterns and the music, and networking those events across clients.




This week's sprints' hours and statuses updated
This week I:
  • Finished Alpha room
    • Changed the lectern book placing to clicking on a lectern vs. last week's method
    • Added more networking events
      • When a 2nd user joins the room and the book positions have already been randomized around the room, they have the books in those positions on their end as well
      • When a user joins the room and any books have already been placed on the lecterns by previous users, those books are placed on the lecterns on their end, and the music tracks for those books are already playing for the new user
      • When a book is removed from a lectern, the music track for that book stops playing for all clients, and all clients can see the book get removed from the lectern
  • Fixed networking bugs
    • Made it so that players cannot steal books and orbs from other players because it caused issues
    • At one point, when another user joined, all the books disappeared for all users
    • Lectern placing issues with book positioning
    • Picking up books placed by other clients on the lecterns caused weird positioning
  • Prepared for and presented the Final presentation

Challenges:

This week, the main challenge was ensuring we had everything done and polished before our presentation so we could present our final demo in its finished state and ensure that nothing broke during the presentation. Because the main interaction in the Alpha room is with the books, there are many things that users can do that need to be networked. So, ensuring that every event involving the books was consistent across clients was difficult and time-consuming. At one point, I thought I finished the code for the room, but then I had to spend many more hours fixing bugs and making improvements.

While working on this project during the semester, the main challenge was setting aside time to work on it while having many other assignments happening at the same time. I had to organize my time properly so that I could finish all of my tasks on time for milestones and presentations.

The main challenge I encountered while working on the project was networking the interactive entities for the rooms: the books and the memory orbs. Since they were both a large part of the activities in the rooms, I wanted them to be visible to other players, however, I ran into an issue with the circles networked component. Since the entities in the Alpha and Delta environments had child entities (inner orb and particle effects for the memory orb and particle effects for the books), they weren’t cloned properly when networking them with the built-in circles-pickup-networking tool. After trial and error, I had to remove the circles-networked component, and I created a function that would save the world position of a picked-up object and emit that position to other clients every 0.01 seconds.

Successes:

This week, I was able to improve the book placing to better match our original storyboards for the Alpha environment. Each book can only be placed on one lectern, and the music tracks that get played are linked to which book gets placed. I was also happy with the particle effects I added for this interaction, which add to the overall feel of the environment.

I was also able to successfully finish the room for the presentation and final submission, and the final Alpha room has everything that we planned it to have. The final Delta room also has all the interactions we planned for it. I learned a lot while working on this project, especially the "joys" of networking events and things across clients. I'm really happy with how the whole gallery experience turned out, and I'm proud of the work that I did for the Alpha and Delta environments.

Number of hours spent on the project:

I spent ~ 17 hours working on different tasks this week.

Adding up all my previous weeks (including this one), I spent a total of 84.25 hours on this project (1.25 + 1.5 + 2.5 + 12.5 + 3 + 13 + 16 + 9 + 8.5 + 17).


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