CSE 125 Spring 2022 Group 2

Week 2 Report

Group Report

Friday April 8th 10am-11am
Monday April 11th 10am-11am
Week 2 Status

This first week of development was primarily spent on initial storyboarding of the game, getting development environments set up, and learning to work together as a team. As a group we were able to complete these tasks: 

  • Storyboard the basic UI/UX of our game
  • Initialize the Trello board
  • Begin modeling characters
  • Set up a basic echo server using Boost and Winsock
  • Begin graphics code
Group Morale

The general group sentiment is that everyone is frustrated with Visual Studio and the setup process, however, we’re still positive and optimistic for the future.

images

Game Character Inspirations

Initial Character Models

UI/UX Wireframe

Figma Link: https://www.figma.com/file/JFsILUBI1UQKMMI66DH4PI/Skrrt-Skirt?node-id=0%3A1

Individual Reports

  1. Concrete goals
  2. Accomplished goals
  3. Unmet goals
  4. Specific goals for next week
  5. Lessons this week
  6. Individual morale

Aiden

  1. My goals for the week were to start learning how to model cars and experiment with textures
  2. I was able to create a low-poly car model and give it a simple png texture
  3. This week was specifically for learning, so if anything, I would say I wish I was able to play around with different car dimensions
  4. My goals for this next week are to create some new car models (we need 4 unique cars) and concept some pageant assets
  5. I learn about using mark seams in Blender to make UV unwrapping more convenient and how cars tend to be shaped
  6. My morale is high as I feel like I’m making good progress

Andrew

  1. My concrete goals for the week were to decide whether our group should use Winsock or Boost/Asio for the client and server and have code that compiles and correctly initiates a client-server connection with an echo server for both Winsock and Boost/Asio.
  2. I was able to accomplish all of the goals I had for the week 
  3. I did not have any unmet goals this week.
  4. My specific goals for next week are to define a baseline data header/body format that our client and server will use to communicate and implement framing and parsing for the client and server so that we can send more complex data between the server and client. 
  5. I learned (and expected to learn) how to set up a basic client and server connection in both Winsock and Boost/Asio.
  6. On a scale of Good / Neutral / Bad, my morale is Good.

Emily

  1. This week I wanted to get the graphics project set up, including the initial environment setup with regards to visual studio as well as have a basic project rendering a cube so that we have a basis to build the rest of our graphics project on. 
  2. At the time of writing this, I’m still unable to render the cube as I had hoped, however, I do know that I have a working project to reference from previous graphics classes. However, the OpenGL glut dependency is giving me some problems, but I hope to resolve that today.
  3. The amount of time that I spent refreshing my OpenGL knowledge took more time than I had expected. It was also difficult to look at code I had written more than a year ago and understand it at a deep enough level to be able to implement it again.
  4. I would like to successfully import a basic model from Aiden. I’ve briefly looked into it and it seems like not all .obj files are the same, so hopefully with some more research, I’m able to find a library that imports .obj files from Blender.
    After getting the model loaded, I want to work on getting textures loaded onto the models.
  5. Expect things to take longer than you think! This is totally something I always try to keep in mind when starting new projects, but I still end up being overly optimistic.
    Looking at my old graphics projects is really helpful because I’ve largely forgotten a lot of my old graphics work. I think once I spend more time with the code, it’ll come back to me more.
  6. I’m still extremely excited to work on cool graphics effects! There is just this initial setup related stuff that is really difficult to do sometimes because it’s more tedious.

Evan

  1. My concrete goals this week were to determine whether we will use Winsock or Boost/Asio for the network communication, and to build a simple echo server using the chosen API.
  2. Both goals were accomplished.
  3. No goals unmet
  4. Next week’s goals are to create framing and parsing protocols on the server, and to define a protocol for the packet.
  5. I learned about Boost/Asio vs Winsock: Boost/Asio is generally better than Winsock because it works cross-platform and has higher level functions that are easier to work with.
  6. I’m pretty excited to learn a lot of new skills and techniques, but a little scared that there will be a lot of difficult things to figure out (i.e. Physics)

Steven

  1. My goal for this week was to set up the groundwork for collision.
  2. I made a simple boolean collision function for bounding boxes. I also made a uniform grid data structure that should make checking collisions between objects must faster (though I still need to add some features, primarily a way to quickly update it when objects move).
  3. This was not an explicit goal, but I would’ve liked to have more concrete functions for movement worked out.
  4. My goal for next week is to create the basic movement system. This includes writing functions to update the uniform grid, check collisions between objects (which will use the bounding box collision check already written), and move/rotate objects and their bounding boxes.
  5. I learned about the Separating Axis Theorem (I knew I would need to read up on collision checking methods but hadn’t decided exactly what I was going to use). I also learned that you can use brackets to access specific components of glm vectors, which was not a lesson I expected to learn but will likely come in handy since it means I can now write simple loops when I need to do the same operation on every axis.
  6. My morale is fairly high and I feel like I am making decent progress.

Terry

  1. My goals for this week were to create a UI/UX wireframe on Figma to storyboard a workflow for gameplay. My other goal was to test and learn about Winsock vs Boost.
  2. This week I finished making a rough wireframe for gameplay on Figma. I also successfully set up Visual Studio to test echo-server for Boost.
  3. I met all my goals for this week, looking to do more next week.
  4. I will be working more on the information/protocols for communicating between the client and the server with Andrew, Steven, and Evan this upcoming week.
  5. I learned how to use Visual Studio and looked into Boost library for client-server communication.
  6. Regarding individual morale, I’m doing alright, feeling a bit lost in all the work as we’re all figuring things out and just getting started. I’m a bit worried because there’s so much I’m unfamiliar with but I’m excited because we have a pretty cool game idea.

William

  1. This week, my concrete goals were to set up my visual studio environment, write a checklist so that it is easy to onboard the team to this environment, and finally to repurpose some CSE 167 code to run a hello world program to render something in the new environment.
  2. Didn’t fully accomplish anything, but I learned a lot about visual studio in the process.
  3. Figuring out visual studio is taking way longer than expected. In previous classes, I just loaded solution files for visual studio projects, so I never learned how to structure a project.
  4. Next week, I would like to be able to load a model, have a basic lighting kernel, and make a scene graph.
  5. I learned way more about visual studio than I would have expected. Most of my experience, both at UCSD and professional, has been via VS Code SSH client, and compiling with make or some other script, so it is nice to learn how to do it with a heavy IDE.
  6. Working with visual studio has been frustrating, but overall I am very positive about the project. After we figure out dev ops, I think we have a clear path for developing our graphics.