Category: Quarter 2

This past week in the capstone has gone very well compared to the last couple. The alpha is behind us and that has given the team a lot of stress relief. Now, the goal is cleaning up our code for the alpha in order to release a working beta. On my part I have some work to do (that might involve re-doing some of my code which I’m not happy about) but I am getting it done. The main problem is in how I created wall objects and the fact that Unity has no way to grab an object just by it’s location. I think the best (maybe only) way of doing this is by when I create the objects, I instantiate all of them into a list and then iterate through all of them one by one when I do the clean up. There might be a slight issue in the way I am doing the clean up as it will likely make the game lag a lot, but as far as a beta release is concerned I think its ok to have it this way. It does feel kind of bad though. The next thing that I have to do is change the input for what texture the code reads. The code currently finds a specific picture in the Resources folder. I will have to find a way to get the path of a maze picture off a click or import in order to use that as the path for the texture. I will have a problem here because what I am currently using requires the picture to be located in the Resources folder. So importing pictures from the camera or camera roll will require the pictures to first be sent to the resources folder before being able to load it. I’m not sure of the practicality of this, it might be better to just have a different method of importing just for the camera or camera roll.

This week has gone amazingly. I finished part of the project that has been worrying me for a long time: turning an image into game objects. In its current state, the code requires the maze to be drawn on a white background, but it works and is able to create a maze out of colliding-walls that are built out of small individual components. I think the next big step for me is changing the input to the code so that it can grab any maze of choice, though I’m not sure how that’s going to be implemented as of now. This has taken up most of my time in the past week or two as I have decided to focus on the project rather than my other classes, so it will be nice to hopefully have everything leveled out to where I can work on every class a little bit at a time. Something that is worrying me immediately is that I have a midterm in one of my classes that I’m not sure I’m completely ready for, but since I have finished this part of the project I will be able to give the midterm my full attention until it is over. I feel that I am pretty lucky that this is my only midterm this year as my classes other than that have been two projects (this is one of the two), and a series of Labs that have taken the majority of my time spent on that class. As far as figuring out how to convert images to game objects, I think it’s a little weird and very annoying how it was so stressful the entire time I was working on it, but now that I’ve finished I think it was a lot of fun. It definitely helps that I think it’s really cool now that it works. Hopefully the next part of the project won’t be as stressful (though I expect it be), but I’m sure I will have enjoyed it once it’s over.

This week in the project we actually made a lot of progress. We have found good materials and made good progress on the project. I think we are going in a good direction for this project, the only problem that the team ran into this week is with the code review. The code review required us to share code that we wrote for our teammates to review. The problem that we ran into was that our game is a lot of manipulating Unity assets, which means changing Unity settings and not developing our own code. We will be picking up the pace from now on in order to hopefully have a lot more code for the next code review, but overall we are doing well for the project. For other classes, things are starting to level out in terms of work load which is sadly not a good thing since there is still a lot to do at one time. But, at least for this class, the further that we get in the project the more fun it becomes so it’s nice to be looking forward to something.

This week for the capstone went by very slowly. I spent most of my time familiarizing my self with Unity and trying to find options/sources for image processing. Image processing seems like a daunting task and I would like to get started on it as soon as I can. This past week has been a bit hectic for my other classes, and since I tend to be due date driven, I will do things in order of due dates all at once instead of spacing out work over weeks. I will definitely prioritize this project for the next week and will try to get into the habit of spending a little bit of time on everything. I enjoy being focused on something and sitting something through until it is done, but with large projects like this on top of my other classes, it doesn’t seem very feasible to attempt to do everything all at once especially since a breather from stress is good every once in a while. I feel comfortable with Unity basics for now and will be spending all of my time on the project for the week getting familiar with image processing and coding/debugging when I’m able. I think the end goal for this week will be to process a straight line into something that can turn into a wall for the game. Processing an image as multiple connected lines is an advance task for me at this point, so I will take it slow and will move with the goal of producing anything. The stress from other classes has settled down a bit and will be at least a little bit lighter for the next few days so I’m glad to have the option to rest in between jobs when needed.

This is the first blog since the previous quarter so I’ll summarize the previous quarter quickly. The first quarter in this project was all about documentation, figuring out project details and requirements, and getting to know the group that I will be working with for the rest of the project. Now that we are in the second phase of the project, we will be working on code for the project as a team. So far, we have set up a task board using Trello, and divided the project requirements into accomplishable tasks in order to give our project direction. There was plenty of confusion at first (we didn’t set up the task board properly the first time) and it has been fairly slow-coming for now, but hopefully as we get into the groove of things we will be able to pick up the pace and start getting some serious work done. I am currently still playing around with Unity to try and learn how everything works and while learning how to use a new tool is difficult, I think I can at least produce recognizable results already so I am excited to continue working on it. The involvement of turning drawings into game objects is a little intimidating since it seems like the most difficult part of the project, but I’m sure that once we get working it will come together nicely. Hopefully there are sources that we can reference or find assistance from in online forums, YouTube, etc., but that part of the project is still a little bit away since we have to lay the ground work first.