Week 4 Report

It lives!!

A tiny cylinder next to a box — it took me too long to realize why the cylinder wasn’t rendering. it’s just smaller than the model 💀 💀

I hacked in some more shapes (temporary) to play around with

I added camera locking support so it’s now a first person game

A block of code with a single line circled in red — learn how he fixed player movement with just this one line 🤯

Little red squares flying upwards — kenzo’s particles !!

Napkin drawing describing a map idea, with the boss trapped inside a time bubble next to a relatively tiny player — idea-ing

Grey stone walls and a green floor barely visible in darkness — adding another model and for some reason it only renders when the other models aren’t loaded

A square shadow from the cube being cast on the green floor — you can see the shadows cast by the cubes onto th eground though

i made the lights move lol. yeah i put the entire world inside a default blender cube

A pink frosted donut — ill try it now w the donut

Black lines on the green floor — oh lol i was wondering where the black lines were coming from and i think it’s just the walls of the cavern being casted on itself. oh it’s because the shadow camera’s position isn’t being updated

A white room layout — yay sample map! it doesnt have color or anything

Midst the pitch black darkness, there are two shadows being cast from the two light sources by the concept map — these shadows casted are cool

Group status

Meeting: Sunday, April 28, 2024

We adjusted movement, created preliminary Blender models, made the game first-person, added a freecam mode for debugging purposes, and added a particle system, in addition to better structuring our code to prepare for future features.

Our goals for next week, by team:

Networking and game logic
- Continue to refine player movement
- Create a system for interacting with and physically combining objects
- Add multiplayer support
Graphics and art
- Begin work on entity models
- Add more map details
- Better integrate the toon shader into our render pipeline
- Extend the particle system

At this point, we might begin redistributing team members from graphics to game logic.

We’re still excited to continue working on our game, but we’re starting to feel a bit behind. Nonetheless, our post-meeting social on Sunday greatly helped our morale.

Individual statuses

Nick

what were your concrete goals for the week?

Geting a player object working, setting up a demo world with objects for the player to run around and jump on top of. Basically, get movement in a 3d space working and tune it (to a reasonable extent) so that it feels right. Start making game object collisions affect the Game state for certain interactions (like 2 objects colliding to make a larger or crafted object).
what goals were you able to accomplish?

I got the movement partially working with Tyler and he finished it later. I fixed the player input so that it actually continually moves the player when you press the button. Running around and pushing objects was working.
if the week went differently than you had planned, what were the reasons? note that this happens regularly…I would prefer you to be aggressive in what you want to try accomplish rather than limit yourself to goals you know you’ll easily achieve. so answering this question is more of a reflection on the development process and the surprises you encounter, it’s not at all an evaluation.

I wasn’t able to tune player movement, and I wasn’t able to get collision events started this week. This is just because I had a lot less time to work on things this week which is unfortunate :(. I am in Hawai’i though which is pretty fortunate!
what are your specific goals for the next week?

Get re-acclimated with the group and figure out what everyone is doing. Help Tyler create an interactable entity class, get a prototype where players can pick up and throw around objects. Make objects that delete themselves and turn into new game objects when they collide!
what did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it?)

Nothing really! 🤩🥰🥰
what is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?

It’s pretty good overall. I feel well-rested and excited to continue work on the game when I return from my trip!

A waterfall forming a rainbow from its mist on a green, overgrown cliffside

Marcelo

what were your concrete goals for the week?

Build a basic player input system to allow players to progress through the game
what goals were you able to accomplish?

Designed the material system to apply frictions on the ground. Constructed a basic movement script that just apply physical force to players to move them.
if the week went differently than you had planned, what were the reasons? note that this happens regularly…I would prefer you to be aggressive in what you want to try accomplish rather than limit yourself to goals you know you’ll easily achieve. so answering this question is more of a reflection on the development process and the surprises you encounter, it’s not at all an evaluation.

This week went pretty much the same way as I planned 😄
what are your specific goals for the next week?

Finetune player movement AND start working on game logic
what did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it?)

I learned how cannon-es handles friction using contactmaterial system, which is a fascinating idea that enable atransitive friction properties
what is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?

Pretty normal. Although I do want to spend more time on this moving forward as I feel like we are a little bit behind.

Tyler

what were your concrete goals for the week? My concrete goals for the week were to:
1. Work on the branch to get multiple players on the network (not cookies)
2. Work with Nick to get some really basic cookies working for the game
3. Do some significant work on the actual game logic. SPECIFICALLY, I want to create an interactible entity
4. Create some new Entity implementations so that we can be a bit more specific when working with stuff
5. Talk with Killian about getting someone else also on Blender
what goals were you able to accomplish?

Honestly, I don’t think I got any of the goals done. This week was weirdly difficult for me, and I didn’t get about any work on the game done at all.
if the week went differently than you had planned, what were the reasons? note that this happens regularly…I would prefer you to be aggressive in what you want to try accomplish rather than limit yourself to goals you know you’ll easily achieve. so answering this question is more of a reflection on the development process and the surprises you encounter, it’s not at all an evaluation.

I was right, I was super tired for the week and didn’t get much done at all. Had to crunch for a few other classes and a quiz and things like it.

I really wish that I could’ve found the effort to push through for some of the simpler stuff, like creating a basic, unimplemeted interactible entity, because then I could’ve had a base to work off of, but I really haven’t done any of that.

I did talk with Killian a bit though, and it’s not looking like he’s going to need anyone else on blender so far.
what are your specific goals for the next week?
1. Work on the branch to get multiple players on the network (not cookies)
2. Work with Nick to get some really basic cookies working for the game
3. Do some significant work on the actual game logic. SPECIFICALLY, I want to create an interactible entity
4. Create some new Entity implementations so that we can be a bit more specific when working with stuff
5. Work on the physics of the player model, because it’s a bit broken right now
6. Work on some game design of the map with Killian, hopefully
what did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it?)

I don’t know if I learned much this week.

It was definitely unexpected how difficult it was, and for seemingly no reason. Mental health is weird, man.
what is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?

My morale is actually pretty terrible.

My guess is that group morale is great, especially given that the last meeting we had was more of a social than it was an actual group meeting, but my inability to work on this project (which is small, but I think much larger than what the rest of the group really thinks it is) is going to grate at me for another week or so.

I would really love to get some serious help in this project other than project management, because it still feels like I’m a liability instead of a leading force.

Killian

My concrete goals this week were to finish some Blender tutorials and start making a working map and other game assets in 3D.
This week I was able to finish the Blender tutorials I wanted to finish, export a donut for the team to put into the game, then made a sample map and player to also be put into the game.
For this week, I did meet my goals from last week but I definitely wanted to make more even more assets in 3D so I could better get used to the work flow of it.
Next week, I want to focus on working almost exclusively in 3D, either adding more details to the map, making a finalized version of the player, or start on the boss and evil mushroom entities.
This week, I learned more a lot more about the 3D modeling workflow, both on the modeling side and the exporting side.
I feel better than last week since I actually accomplished the goals that I set last week this week. I also enjoyed hanging out with the team outside of a working/meeting environment this week!

Sean

Last week, I didn’t really establish any concrete goals. I said I’d push off refactoring our rendering engine until we had a more concrete idea of what our game would look like. I ended up exceeding my expectations for this week, as well as making some smaller changes, including:

Added the ability for the server to lock a camera’s position to that of an entity, effectively making the game a first-person game.
Defined an interface Model for a model that an entity could reference—a model for an entity is like a costume for a Scratch sprite. This is part of the refactoring I wanted in the graphics code, so this should open up the door for other code cleanups and clarify the mental model for how we want to represent different model formats in our game.
Added more Blender models and fixed errors that arose.
Massively improved performance just by removing checkError calls that were no longer used. Adding Killian’s concept player and map models greatly killed the frame rate, and that was because he built them out of many meshes (cubes and planes) in Blender, and drawing each mesh calls checkError multiple times. A checkError call requires waiting on the GPU to finish whatever it’s doing, which can take a while. Our game is smooth again, at least for now.

I found this WebGL state diagram that really helped me understand how OpenGL/WebGL’s state machine works and what state affects what. A lot of the bugs I encountered this week were due to the WebGL state being left in an unexpected state, so I think next week we should refactor our code to keep all state in one class, then pass the state that we want in a declarative way to the class. The class can then figure out what WebGL calls need to be made.

My current morale is still pretty motivated. However, I’m a bit annoyed that the player can’t move anymore once it lands, so the game is currently less playable than it was before.

Will

Test lighting/shadows, create a shader pipeline with postprocessing steps, help out with particle system and Blender models if needed.
I wrote the foundation for a shader pipeline which renders the scene to a 2D texture and then renders that texture onto a screen-filling plane; the plan is to be able to add and swap out arbitrary 2D effects/filters (e.g. cel shading, bloom) as additional shader programs acting on the texture. In order to make it easier to inspect our lighting effects, I also added a client-side freecam mode.
I still wasn’t able to test out the lighting very much because we didn’t quite have models or an interface to the physics engine ready yet. However, what I’ve seen so far looked correct, and we have more of the systems in place which bring us closer to being able to drop our models into the game world.
Flesh out the shader pipeline, convert Kenzo’s toon shader into a 2D version that we can add to the pipeline, maybe help fix lighting bugs with the map model or move to game logic.
It seems safer to just clean up completely after every WebGL operation, e.g. unbind all textures and buffers. Otherwise we get errors that are very hard to identify and debug.
Good. We had a sort of team social over the weekend where we went to UTC which was pretty fun. I’m looking forward to the point where we can start focusing on game logic after the engine/platform is done.

Kenzo

what were your concrete goals for the week?

Finish implementing particle systems and try to modify them so it is expandable.
what goals were you able to accomplish?

I was able to finish implementing the particle systems and was able to tweak the particle’s speed and positions and colors.
if the week went differently than you had planned, what were the reasons? note that this happens regularly…I would prefer you to be aggressive in what you want to try accomplish rather than limit yourself to goals you know you’ll easily achieve. so answering this question is more of a reflection on the development process and the surprises you encounter, it’s not at all an evaluation.

I was surprised that a lot of errors came up during my implementation. I was stuck on those errors for a long time so I asked Sean to help me debug the code. He was able to fix and adjust some of the code so that those errors disappeared. Thanks to Sean’s help, we were able to make the particle system work.
what are your specific goals for the next week?

Continue modifying the particle systems so it can do cooler stuff!
what did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it?)

I learned about TransformFeedback and how it is used to avoid doing calculation on the CPU and pushing the changes to the buffer directly so it optimizes the code and reduce lag.
what is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?

I am excited to learn more about the graphics side of the code and hoping that I can also go into the networking side to help other members.

Meeting notes

Present: Kenzo, Sean, Will, Killian, Marcelo, Tyler

Hawaii: Nick

nick is gone, tyler has done nothing
marcelo: framework for physics materials
- folder of all materials
- export every material
- then use it in the game class
thursday: kenzo added particles
- it appears they are broken now
we need to make another camera for the boss. Will’s job
game will be first person, so map will prioritize that. make map bigger for players. killian should prioritize adding details
main purpose of meeting: updates
particle system is working
will discuss game design after we get everything working
Tyler/networking: new entities, work on player movement
graphics: need to get pipeline working (toon shading)

We proceeded to do a social at UTC.