Month: October 2020

This week we for our project we went over the project requirements. We went into specifications on what needed to be done and touched on the technologies that will be used to complete the project. The easiest thing for our project this week was the technologies. Figuring out what to use for the project was fairly simple for two reasons. First, our project was used as an example for the ‘technologies review’ discussion post. our team took this as a suggestion as to what technologies to use and when we looked into them a little more we figured they would be easy enough to use. Second, we had already decided on Unity for our game engine. This meant that the rest of our technologies were easy to figure out, since Unity 5 uses aspects of Physx (nvidia open source physics engine) as its default for some aspects. Unity also requires the use of C#, and OpenCV is the computer vision aspect that we chose since searching “computer vision unity” results in OpenCV being 2 of the top 3 results. Happily, nothing went wrong this week with the project. The information was already gathered and it was just a matter of piecing it together to present. The future looks promising as well as I was able to find good resources, mostly on YouTube, that will be useful in upcoming parts of the project, mainly when we setup the UI, which I’m glad about because that will be the part of the project that I am responsible for.

This week for the capstone project went pretty smoothly. We compiled our problem statements into one all inclusive team problem statement. The only issue that we had was formatting and grammar, but since that was just a matter of proofreading and editing it wasn’t a big deal. A tool that I looked into more this week is MySQL, a database management system. I will likely be using MySQL for the capstone project as well as in a project for another class so I will be getting more familiar with it in the near future. It is an important part of my other project, and it can be used for the capstone project, so I am really glad that there are a lot of tutorials and help about its use. I can’t see any problems for the project going forward for the moment (except for the guaranteed bugs of course) so I am still ready and expectant for what is to come.

Our Projects have only just begun so there’s not a whole lot to say about them yet, but I can still talk about what has happened and what I look forward to.

To begin with, what has happened so far. So far I have gotten to know my teammates and have written a problem statement for the project and team conduct guidelines. I’ll go with the best and worst about each. The best things about my teammates is that it seems like we will be able to get along as we have shared interests, and have been able to get solid communication so far. The worst thing is that one of my teammates is currently living in China, so there is a 15 hour time difference. This is a bit of issue since live communication (discord or zoom calls) will be hard to host with all 3 of us since the best time to have it would be afternoon PST and my other teammate works mostly afternoon shifts. We are still communicating well despite that, which is a great sign for the future. The best thing about the problem statement was getting to know exactly what the project had in store. I think that our draw and play videogame sounds super interesting and I really look forward to getting to learn about app design and image processing. The worst part of the problem statement was definitely writing it. Formal writing is difficult. Building the team conduct guidelines went really well. We all contributed to it and looked it over before turning it in and honestly I’m not at all worried about how we will get along and from what I’ve heard from my teammates so far. I don’t think there will be any reason for complaints.

I am looking forward to really getting into the project. I know that it’s some time coming and that it will be really difficult to get started, but getting started is always the hardest part. All of the things that the project is made out of interest me and I hope that I will be able to have fun with it without having the stress overwhelm me. The professional side of the project does worry me a little (I’m worried I’ll do something wrong) but it’ll be a good experience.

Since this is my first blog post, I thought it would be appropriate to leave the title as is.

My name is Gavin Thompson and I am a fourth year Computer Science student at OSU. My interest in computers started with video games and with everything I learn my interest grows. Computer graphics, networking, game development, server management, etc., I would like to learn and continue learning about all of these. I am currently most interested in networking and computer graphics and will continue taking classes in these areas. I look forward to working with others on a project. I am hoping that the project will be fun and useful when completed.

Nice to meet you all!