Well guys, now that I've started to blog, I figured I may as well bring my blog over to the temp. Basically, my blog pretty much covers my Uni life and the such. I'm kinda new to blogging so my "blogging style" might be considered pretty crap by some vets. Or, it might be considered refreshing to some people. I dunno. I just write down what I wanna say. I usually kinda continue my blogs on from the last one, instead of just randomised blogs. I've made a couple before this, which if you really want to read, you can find it here: http://www.bebo.com/Blog.jsp?MemberId=4799669088
Anyway...
So , I'm in Semester 2 now. So far, somehow, Semester 2 seems a little easier. Maybe it's because the work load hasn't changed, I'm just simply used to the easier work load. Maybe it's because the workload has actually been reduced. Maybe I'm just not doing as much? Wait, no, that's definitely not it.
Anyway, so far, I've done 2 assignments. The first one was the 3D Graphics assignment, where I had to make a hierarchal model of anything that I wanted. The second was a 3D Game prototype using Mission Maker.
The 3D Game Prototype was kind of hard, actually. The first reason was due to the fact I was using Mission Maker. The second was due to an issue with the team. Basically, the issue was the team was that we were originally going to have 3 members. This was fine; all of our team was very capable at doing our respective tasks. However, we got a fourth member of our team who while we was willing to accept in our group, we knew that said person probably wasn’t going contribute as well.
So, we had to change our battle plan. Instead of doing a 3x3 grid of bigger rooms to show off our puzzles, we decided to take away the centre-right room from our 3x3 grid so we only have 8 rooms. This way, we can not only fairly distribute the workload for the actual game (quite obviously, we couldn’t truly do this for the whole project, lead programmers or team leaders always have a bigger workload then a person just doing level design), but it worked well in terms of risk management. If one person didn’t do their rooms, we still had a nice 2x3 shape. It was unlikely, but if 2 people didn’t do their rooms, we still had a very nice 2x2 shape. It wasn’t as big, but it was still appropriate considering the size of the work force.
Unfortunately, our fourth team member didn’t actually hand anything in. But hey, our games teacher understood our predicament and was pleased with our ability to come up with risk management techniques, so our score wasn’t affected in any way by having our content being scaled down a little.
The only other problem with developing the prototype was the software we were developing it with. Now, I’m not bashing the integrity of Mission Maker, considering how streamlined everything is, and it’s “drag and drop†nature, it’s actually a rather robust program. The only problem is, for the prototype we wanted to develop, Mission Maker felt very limiting in the things you could actually do with it. Basically, there was only one gun in the game, there were only premade rooms (yes, you could add stuff to them, but not change the shape) and everything was rule based.
I feel bad for slandering this product, especially considering it’s really only designed for prototypes, but I feel a lot more at ease now our team and I can use our own engine and tweak it to our needs. If there was a way of importing in our own models and maps into Mission Maker, I’d probably appreciate the product a lot more.
Anyway, we got our prototype finished and everything. Fantastic. Now, only one more problem. The design document I had made sucked horribly. I mean, it’s actually a laughable design document compared to the design document I was supposed to make, seriously. The one I was supposed to make was closer to 50 pages, where as the one I made was only 7 or 8 pages. The reason for this was the fact that I didn’t know there was a document template I was supposed to adhere to when making it, and instead went along with my own template which I had used for the past 2 game assignments and had received respectable grades for. The worst thing was that I had only known about this “recommended†template about 20 minutes before I had to hand everything in.
****.
I told my teacher what had happened, and he told me to just hand in whatever I had and he’ll mark it accordingly. Oh joy, there’s all my marks for the design document gone out of the window! Considering it’s worth 40% of the marks, I was severely annoyed at my own incompetency to say the least. Oh well. At least I handed something in. It’s better than nothing.
As for my 3D Graphics assignment, we had to make a "respresentation of an object in the real world by turning it into a hierarchal model in the virtual world". Basically, model something using OpenGL in a specific way, gotcha. From the get go, I decided I wanted to do a robot. Robots are awesome, and they seemed relatively easy to do. So, the instant I get the assignment (which luckily was during a practical session), I start on my robot. Well, that's a lie, we got shown an example of how we had to do a hierarchal model first, THEN I went to do the robot!
At first, it seemed awesome. I had got my static robot up and running in a few days and pretty much animated by the next friday. I had worked non-stop for the entire week doing this robot, I was that enthused by it all. I showed my teacher and he thought it was really awesome. He was impressed at how far everyone had gotten in 1 week, considering last year all people had was a small modification to the example he gave us, and this year people had aeroplanes, warships, canons, and other such stuff. My teacher had also posed a challenge for me - he wanted to see if I could make my robots arms bend as well as move. So far, I only had the robots arms and legs moving, as well as have 3 robots on the screen (although only 1 was controllable - more on this later), so the idea of a bigger challenge excited me.
I go to work on it and by monday I've made progress - although it isn't perfect. Monday, however, was when the bomb dropped. I got told that the way I was doing my robot was actually wrong, it wasn't hierarchal, and if I were to hand that in I'd get a clear fail. The person who told me this, though, was a student and not the teacher. In all fairness, said student tried to help me make it more hierarchal but she managed to make my head and left arm disappear - not good. I tried to get it to work once again and I couldn't get hold of my teacher until the thursday - one day before the assignment deadline. I talk to him and explain my situation, and he basically tells me if I can't get it to work my friends way, do it his way instead, and shows me on my UML diagram how to make the object hierarchal. Well, I go to try it his way and it works first time. Amazing!
The bad news though, as I said, was that I had just over 24 hours to get this robots arms to bend, control all 3 robots, write up documentation and make the head move. It was going to be a MISSION! So, first of all, with me super pumped up having the super pressure of having so little time left, I got my arms working by the evening. They bend, and they bend realistically. So, next, was getting all 3 robots controlled. Now, luckily, I took a very OO approach to this whole assignment. Anything that controlled the robot, such as the variables for the locations of the parts, or the methods for moving said parts, all got shoved into the robot class, instead of having it all done globally. What this means was, all I had to do was create instances of the same class, pass an x offset variable (so they all were not in the same position) and then just create a toggle which switched the control between various robots.
By the morning (don't worry, I had some sleep!), I had got this feature working. The last 2 bits now, before the presentation, was getting the controls on the screen and making the head move. Getting the head to move was a breeze, I just quickly created a method and shoved it into the keyboard class. Took all of 5-10 minutes. Getting the controls on the screen was also pretty easy. The hardest part was getting the locations of the text right, seen as it was all bitmapped based and not vector based (my teacher had a predefined method for such things and I couldn't be bothered to make my own).
I think my teacher seemed to like it, but he doesn't show off any emotion during the examination process, which is very annoying. Anyway, I quickly wrote up my documentation and handed it into the examination office. THERE, DONE!
It was a wild couple of weeks, and it's amazing that I pulled all that off in what was actually under 2 weeks. That handicap of trying to fix my broken robot for half the week was very frustrating, I probably could have got my legs to bend too if I had the extra time. But hey, that's life though.
Anyway, hoped you all enjoyed reading my lengthy blog. I don't usually do them very frequently, it's usually only one every couple of months, although I'd love to try to do them monthly. When I get used to it more, I probably will do so. Thanks for Reading.
- Teej
Anyway...
So , I'm in Semester 2 now. So far, somehow, Semester 2 seems a little easier. Maybe it's because the work load hasn't changed, I'm just simply used to the easier work load. Maybe it's because the workload has actually been reduced. Maybe I'm just not doing as much? Wait, no, that's definitely not it.
Anyway, so far, I've done 2 assignments. The first one was the 3D Graphics assignment, where I had to make a hierarchal model of anything that I wanted. The second was a 3D Game prototype using Mission Maker.
The 3D Game Prototype was kind of hard, actually. The first reason was due to the fact I was using Mission Maker. The second was due to an issue with the team. Basically, the issue was the team was that we were originally going to have 3 members. This was fine; all of our team was very capable at doing our respective tasks. However, we got a fourth member of our team who while we was willing to accept in our group, we knew that said person probably wasn’t going contribute as well.
So, we had to change our battle plan. Instead of doing a 3x3 grid of bigger rooms to show off our puzzles, we decided to take away the centre-right room from our 3x3 grid so we only have 8 rooms. This way, we can not only fairly distribute the workload for the actual game (quite obviously, we couldn’t truly do this for the whole project, lead programmers or team leaders always have a bigger workload then a person just doing level design), but it worked well in terms of risk management. If one person didn’t do their rooms, we still had a nice 2x3 shape. It was unlikely, but if 2 people didn’t do their rooms, we still had a very nice 2x2 shape. It wasn’t as big, but it was still appropriate considering the size of the work force.
Unfortunately, our fourth team member didn’t actually hand anything in. But hey, our games teacher understood our predicament and was pleased with our ability to come up with risk management techniques, so our score wasn’t affected in any way by having our content being scaled down a little.
The only other problem with developing the prototype was the software we were developing it with. Now, I’m not bashing the integrity of Mission Maker, considering how streamlined everything is, and it’s “drag and drop†nature, it’s actually a rather robust program. The only problem is, for the prototype we wanted to develop, Mission Maker felt very limiting in the things you could actually do with it. Basically, there was only one gun in the game, there were only premade rooms (yes, you could add stuff to them, but not change the shape) and everything was rule based.
I feel bad for slandering this product, especially considering it’s really only designed for prototypes, but I feel a lot more at ease now our team and I can use our own engine and tweak it to our needs. If there was a way of importing in our own models and maps into Mission Maker, I’d probably appreciate the product a lot more.
Anyway, we got our prototype finished and everything. Fantastic. Now, only one more problem. The design document I had made sucked horribly. I mean, it’s actually a laughable design document compared to the design document I was supposed to make, seriously. The one I was supposed to make was closer to 50 pages, where as the one I made was only 7 or 8 pages. The reason for this was the fact that I didn’t know there was a document template I was supposed to adhere to when making it, and instead went along with my own template which I had used for the past 2 game assignments and had received respectable grades for. The worst thing was that I had only known about this “recommended†template about 20 minutes before I had to hand everything in.
****.
I told my teacher what had happened, and he told me to just hand in whatever I had and he’ll mark it accordingly. Oh joy, there’s all my marks for the design document gone out of the window! Considering it’s worth 40% of the marks, I was severely annoyed at my own incompetency to say the least. Oh well. At least I handed something in. It’s better than nothing.
As for my 3D Graphics assignment, we had to make a "respresentation of an object in the real world by turning it into a hierarchal model in the virtual world". Basically, model something using OpenGL in a specific way, gotcha. From the get go, I decided I wanted to do a robot. Robots are awesome, and they seemed relatively easy to do. So, the instant I get the assignment (which luckily was during a practical session), I start on my robot. Well, that's a lie, we got shown an example of how we had to do a hierarchal model first, THEN I went to do the robot!
At first, it seemed awesome. I had got my static robot up and running in a few days and pretty much animated by the next friday. I had worked non-stop for the entire week doing this robot, I was that enthused by it all. I showed my teacher and he thought it was really awesome. He was impressed at how far everyone had gotten in 1 week, considering last year all people had was a small modification to the example he gave us, and this year people had aeroplanes, warships, canons, and other such stuff. My teacher had also posed a challenge for me - he wanted to see if I could make my robots arms bend as well as move. So far, I only had the robots arms and legs moving, as well as have 3 robots on the screen (although only 1 was controllable - more on this later), so the idea of a bigger challenge excited me.
I go to work on it and by monday I've made progress - although it isn't perfect. Monday, however, was when the bomb dropped. I got told that the way I was doing my robot was actually wrong, it wasn't hierarchal, and if I were to hand that in I'd get a clear fail. The person who told me this, though, was a student and not the teacher. In all fairness, said student tried to help me make it more hierarchal but she managed to make my head and left arm disappear - not good. I tried to get it to work once again and I couldn't get hold of my teacher until the thursday - one day before the assignment deadline. I talk to him and explain my situation, and he basically tells me if I can't get it to work my friends way, do it his way instead, and shows me on my UML diagram how to make the object hierarchal. Well, I go to try it his way and it works first time. Amazing!
The bad news though, as I said, was that I had just over 24 hours to get this robots arms to bend, control all 3 robots, write up documentation and make the head move. It was going to be a MISSION! So, first of all, with me super pumped up having the super pressure of having so little time left, I got my arms working by the evening. They bend, and they bend realistically. So, next, was getting all 3 robots controlled. Now, luckily, I took a very OO approach to this whole assignment. Anything that controlled the robot, such as the variables for the locations of the parts, or the methods for moving said parts, all got shoved into the robot class, instead of having it all done globally. What this means was, all I had to do was create instances of the same class, pass an x offset variable (so they all were not in the same position) and then just create a toggle which switched the control between various robots.
By the morning (don't worry, I had some sleep!), I had got this feature working. The last 2 bits now, before the presentation, was getting the controls on the screen and making the head move. Getting the head to move was a breeze, I just quickly created a method and shoved it into the keyboard class. Took all of 5-10 minutes. Getting the controls on the screen was also pretty easy. The hardest part was getting the locations of the text right, seen as it was all bitmapped based and not vector based (my teacher had a predefined method for such things and I couldn't be bothered to make my own).
I think my teacher seemed to like it, but he doesn't show off any emotion during the examination process, which is very annoying. Anyway, I quickly wrote up my documentation and handed it into the examination office. THERE, DONE!
It was a wild couple of weeks, and it's amazing that I pulled all that off in what was actually under 2 weeks. That handicap of trying to fix my broken robot for half the week was very frustrating, I probably could have got my legs to bend too if I had the extra time. But hey, that's life though.
Anyway, hoped you all enjoyed reading my lengthy blog. I don't usually do them very frequently, it's usually only one every couple of months, although I'd love to try to do them monthly. When I get used to it more, I probably will do so. Thanks for Reading.
- Teej
