Hello Everyone!
This has been a term that has been filled with lots of new experiences and fun challenges. I have never done quite this big or in depth of a project so seeing everything start to come together has been very exciting. We are moving forward nicely but that isn’t to say it was without any road bumps.
To recap, our project is an Artificial Life Environment challenge where we create our own virtual environment with organisms where they interact and play off of each other. This is similar to the idea of a conways game of life simulation. I am working primarily on the data processing and GUI of our environment.
The data processing was fun experience in order to get to create and experiment with graphs and setter functions where it can easily be called and manipulated in order to show new data for all of the various user selections. Once we start to get some real data it will be fun to get to process that and display it into that interface.
The real task that I have been learning a lot from is the GUI for the environment. This is very much a game related task where you have a large grid and then need to be able to manipulate each cell of the data. I have never before done something like this and so finding the right library and the right methods has been a challenge. I have finally gotten what I think is a good, working idea, however there is a long way to go for manipulating the looks, adding settings, and making it actually run properly when there is possibly hundreds of organisms wanting to change something in the environment.
I have learned a lot so far about development and presenting ideas, designs, research, and other data to project sponsors and other people who might be interested or have a stake in what a project were to look like. It is not what I ever expected, but it has been a good experience for possible future endeavors.
I am very excited to move into the next term where we can take off with development and get rolling on really creating something and bringing it to life to actually have something presentable.
