Week 7 Update

Shane

What were your concrete goals for the week?

Basic map generation, flag pick up

What goals were you able to accomplish?

– Flag pick up works and the flag follows the player

– Don’t remember if I wrote this last week, but we got sending map data to work. We can now generate (only) one cube and send it to the client before the game starts, which the client can render and actually collide with

– Map generation doesn’t work because we got super stuck on a bug where cube colliders are not scaled to what we set it to. Worst case, I am starting to consider having a set map rather than randomly generated maps

What are your specific goals for the next week?

– Find out what is wrong with colliders and actually do map generation

– Gun firing, player hp can also be done easily now that we have a GUI

– Weekly report of which code is bad, really bad: literally everything right now

What did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it?)

– Learned a lot about quad trees.

– Discovered that collisions are as hard to debug as networking.

– Bugs are like emergencies under the American healthcare system, I really can’t afford to have one right now.

I was able to move my internship date 😀

What is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?

I was feeling pretty bad because we actually just got stuck on like 3 super big bugs since Friday and didn’t make a lot of progress, but at the last minute I figured out flag pick up so at least that’s a plus.

Thomas

What were your concrete goals for the week?

Clean up and merge the animation code, make directional lights, and set up the UI code.

What goals were you able to accomplish?

Everything except the directional lights, I decided to get fog working first. Other than that I finished everything I hoped, and got farther on the UI than I expected.

But the best part is we can DAB ON THE HATERS.

If there were goals you were unable to meet, what were the reasons?

Again didn’t finish the spot lights, but I wanted to prioritize other things that would be useful for everyone else working on the game. We’ll want to start building the game logic this week, so we’ll want a way to render the timer, score, health, and even maybe some debugging stuff.

What are your specific goals for the next week?

Now I FINALLY want to finish directional lights and add proper phong shading. Also maybe flush out the rest of the UI, and actually connect it to the game state. I think there needs to be some more work on the client’s game logic before we can get that far though.

What did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it?)

I learned to stop worrying and love ImGUI. I’ve used it in once class, but that was just for changing some floats in my render loop. I never used theming, custom positions, transparent borders, or anything like that. But I have to say, they have some incredible examples and the API is dead simple. The most complicated part was finding the best way to disable mouse and keyboard input to the UI, since we only want it to update from game state. It ended up being a simple set of flags to pass into the ImGui::Begin() function. 

What is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?

I’m feeling good, but I hope we can start getting the game logic together this week. There’s not much time left!

Sam

What were your concrete goals for the week?

Gameplay mechanics, full integration of quadtree collision on the server-side 

What goals were you able to accomplish?

Collision happened last week like this: I move, I touch something, I freeze because I collided, now that’s not exactly what we want since we want to still be able to move once we collided (after all, we’re always “colliding” with the ground). Therefore, James and I spent a few painstaking hours getting that to work and we were thrilled, only to realize the next day that being able to move while colliding only applied to unit box colliders of size 1. Anything greater than size 2 completely wrecks the functionality of the collision. Oh and also I was there to guide Shane spiritually and emotionally when he finished his flag capturing code, so I guess that’s that.  

If there were goals you were unable to meet, what were the reasons?

There is still a huge bug with collision which I am unable to fix, and that has prevented me from making any progress on actual gameplay mechanics, and it is incredibly frustrating 

What are your specific goals for the next week?

Actual Actual Actual Actual gameplay 

What did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it?)

When I first started collision, I thought that it’d be simple and just be checking simple points and planes and comparing them to each other, little did I know it would involve hours of vector math and drawing on pen and paper and lots of tears too. I have completely forgot most of the linear algebra that I learned in freshmen year and it has come back to haunt me. I am incredibly incredibly frustrated by the lack of progress this collision has made and I hope we can make a breakthrough some time soon What is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?
Development this week is a bit slow, mostly due to bugs, but I am still hopeful but a little scared. 

Sheila Pham

What were your concrete goals for the week?

Concrete goal this week was to finally get an animation of the girl to render something in the game. Also wanted to render out the environment and the trees in a random position.

What goals were you able to accomplish?

Yes, after another 6 hours of trying to figure out blender, we were able to export the animations after making sure the file looked proper when we reopened in another blender file. Was able to make a toxic dab animation, and others like walking, shooting and idle. There is a gun and knife model.

If there were goals you were unable to meet, what were the reasons?

Could not render out the environment forest since collision and finding positions and updating on the other graphics side is not working.

What are your specific goals for the next week?

I will make a body pillow flag, maybe a new animation of the player carrying the body pillow

What did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it?)

I learned how to export properly. Do not choose “Include all actions” in the animation when exporting. It’s also safer to reparent and change the weights from the bone that affect the mesh.

What is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein 

Am I insane for doing something different each time but getting the same unwanted result? Initially, we were able to export something weird where the hair and eyes were floating away, but at least the body was moving correctly. Somewhere along the way, I export the same way…., but I don’t get the same thing. The mesh followed the rig, but later it would not. (I WANT TO SCREAM).

Oh wow, blender crash and lost my animations. (PEPE scream). I saved too.

Aneesh

What were your concrete goals for the week?

Fix Networking Async issues.

Add multiplayer support to the game.

What goals were you able to accomplish?

I was able to get multiple players to show up on one client and move around freely.

If there were goals you were unable to meet, what were the reasons?

I was unable to fix the async race condition issues for boost that keep happening at random times. I guess I spent more time than expected on getting multiplayer to work fine. I do have some ideas for fixing the issue though – sending header and message in the same packet instead of priming the client first and then sending the message, using mutexes (probably not this though coz I think that would make things very complicated).

What are your specific goals for the next week?

The first thing on my list is to fix async networking bugs.

After that is done, I guess I will move on to implementing some more of the game logic. This past week, I got a little bit involved in the collision detection side of things so I may continue to help in that area if needed or move on to implementing additional features for the game. Like, I know Shane has some logic for flag capturing. I guess I could work on a point system, or an attack/health system, etc.

What did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it?)

I relearned that async networking will almost always work in a way that you did not intend it to work. With all the race conditions, random errors kept popping up.

I also learned that loading the same model multiple times can actually crash the client because glm does not support that?..?

What is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?

Feeling pretty great now that multiplayer is also working fine. I guess just resolving some minor kinks in networking and collision detection should make our game engine complete. We should now be able to focus completely on the game logic.

James

What were your concrete goals for the week?

Get map generation working.

What goals were you able to accomplish?

Collision with a unit cube works, and the client is able to accurately render the cubes. However, for some strange reason collision ONLY works with unit cubes. 

If there were goals you were unable to meet, what were the reasons?

We did not get started on map generation at all, so there’s that.

What are your specific goals for the next week?

Get everything working, so that we can actually start building the game.

What did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it?)

I learned a little bit about how networking works and how to send things over the network.

What is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?

Not great, very stressed.