Early Progress – #3

Over the past couple weeks, my group and I pretty much finalized the “planning” section of the capstone project. We have a concrete design document in place, and we have a good idea of what to make and how to make it.

With that, we’ve been able to start doing some actual work on the project, mostly to iron out the kinks of the development process. So, for our version 0.0.2, we’ve done some pair programming during one of our regular meetings. We decided that system visualization was a priority with our abstracted simulation, so we created a basic UI and a way to view species populations across different environments. It’s a long way off from looking pretty, but we got number visualization to work fine.

To make it easier to work on this in the future without having to coordinate changes live, we also put the core classes in place, with their core attributes and placeholder logic in important public methods. The logic can be easily swapped out without requiring change in other classes. For example, the genome mechanic can be implemented separately, and pushed into the main build without any merge conflicts in the future.

Overall, I’m quite happy with our progress so far, and it’s looking like we’ll have no issue getting into the meat of developing our project throughout the next semester!