Caden White Capstone

This is the last blog post for the winter semester. Over the course of this semester we got a lot of work done which seemed to be the intent of this semester, to get a bunch of work done. It really was interesting and it felt very work-related as we were required to create 2 sprints and try to get tickets done during these times, putting a lot of emphasis on project management which was good experience. But its not to say it wasn’t without its challenges, and the biggest one this semester for me was class and work management.

Over this semester i took on the most challenges I’ve probably had yet school wise as I took 16 credits with a deep learning graduate class. this semester really pushed me to stay on task and get a lot of work done, learning a bunch of complex topics. the way I tackled this was sectioning out work and planning ahead. this was done by at the begging of every week checking what was due for the next week and determining when and how i would best tackle each assignment.

Moving back to the practicum class I felt very satisfied this semester as our project really feels like its coming together and I’m glad i got this project as I’ve been able to achieve some practice with both ML and also game design which were too major areas I wanted to focus on a learn. I cant wait to see what next semester has in store.

It is finally half way through the semester an we’ve made some decent progress on our project. While we haven’t achieved as much as last semester that is part due to the easier stuff being out of the way as well as our group as a whole being busier. while this could be better i don’t think its a severe issues, as a good majority of our work now is leaning towards building up our AI model. This is good as training an AI model requires a lot of time but not as much input from the dev’s so training can be done in the background while other work is achieved.

For this blog post we were asked to answer one or more questions, and the one i want to answer is, “What is your most favorite technology? Least favorite?” In our project we haven’t had the need to use many different technologies. These could be things like software, libraries, languages and so forth. While we haven’t had to use many relative to other project i think my favorite is VS Code. VS Code while not a true IDE does carry it self as closely as possible allow a huge range of options thanks to its extensions feature allowing for people to create extensions that can benefit you and your code, like highlighting, AI writing or integration for other languages. All of these give vs code a flexibility that’s hard to achieve else where along with a clean UI its my go to code editor so far.

On the other end my least favorite is our version control system, azure dev ops. Azure is like Microsoft’s version of GitHub allowing for version control via branches and pull request so multiple people can work on the project. It also allows access to sprint planning and work items/boards to manage who’s working on what. While all of these are great features without having to workshop where everything is and understanding the program outside of a base level it can be complex to use. Along side this the UI is a little ugly making it harsher on the eyes and hard to find where things are at.

Technologies and their application are pivotal to our project but that doesn’t mean that the current ones are the best or ones we like. That also doesn’t mean that they are bad and should never be used. At the end of the day it may just come down to user preference.

To start of the winter semester we’ve been asked to created a blog regarding clean code and code smells. This is honestly a perfect time to do this as we have all come back from winter break and have take time away from the project thus having clean and readable code is important for getting back into the project. The prompt we were given was what would we like to do more and less often based on the articles. I thought the best way to delve into this would to review our own project code, the positives and the negatives.

One thing that I’m a big fan of is consistent naming conventions. Personally I believe it makes easier to read and to write. Take for example camel case, my most used naming convention, for camel case you are to keep the first word lowercase and every word after capitalized. Take an example from our code;

public float initialSpeed = 5f;

as we can see the variable name is set to initialSpeed which follows camel case. One issue among our whole code base though is in unity, the program follows a camel case convention but the first letter capitalized so our previous variable would become InitialSpeed. This switching of conventions and even sometimes switching to different conventions is seen all over:

private bool TopWallCollsion = false;

AudioSource[] audio_options = GetComponents<AudioSource>();

public bool IsTrainingMode = false;

These issues can be seen all over our code and are one of many code smells in our code but going forward it was something i would like to change and as Robert C Martin had acknowledged in his book clean code, “leave the campground better than we found it” or to clean up the code little by little as we go. I hope to do this more often and make that a goal of mine. Thus if we are to reference the boy scout thought, the thing that I would like to do less often is “leave trash lying around” or more accurately break the habit of writing in my natural case and write in the case fitting to the project.

Wow so its week 10 already. To start our project has been doing pretty well. we made improvements towards developing our agent to play our game against thanks to john and Tyler who have been working on that front. On the game development side, ben said he was going to work on the audio part of the project and I’m looking forward to the changes he will make, hopefully it will appear like a much more polished game afterwards.

On my section I’ve been having some issues, i was told to explore our game manager component which monitors the game state and controls the scene components accordingly, almost like a ref of sorts. the issue I’ve been given though is to make this game manager work for only one game in a scene and then to multiple managers in a scene each for there own game. the issue I’ve been running into though is it is very hard to grab each game manager respective to its own game in the code. Im looking to resolve this issue a number of way either by implementing a “head ref” that over looks all of the game managers or just by updating our current game manager to be more effective across all games. Looking forward to how we solve this.

It has been about 6 weeks and my team has gotten it feet wet with our project, ML breakout. ML breakout is a project aimed at recreating Atari’s breakout using unity and then adding machine learning to this project making it such that a player could play an artificial intelligence or just play breakout as it was.

Since the first blog post we’ve worked on numerous paper’s explaining what this project is, why were perusing this project and how we plan on achieving it. These have been very beneficial for us as this has allowed us to create a clear outline for our project and our team has handled these very well. While these have been good for us in defining our project we have been wanting to get into the project and luckily we have V 0.0.1 upcoming so we well soon be able to start creating. Cant wait to see how it turns out.

Hey, my name is Caden and I’m a senior computer science major living in Corvallis, Oregon. One of my biggest hobbies has been soccer where I played for about 15 years, both competitively through high school and club and still play to this day. I’ve also been an avid video game player with my most played game as Destiny 2 and have watched numerous tv shows and anime.

I first got started with computers and software when I originally did a summer camp back in middle school where we did some basic Minecraft modding. I enjoyed this class quite a bit and luckily there were more summer camps like them and I took quite a few more at a place called Silicon Stem Academy. At Silicon I took many of there classes and around high school I would go on to work for them teaching the same classes that I took. Because of this I realized that I enjoyed working in tech and wanted to pursue it. After this I would go to Oregon state, where I’m going into my senior year after only 2 years and with a 3.68 GPA.