Week 5 Progress Report

Graphics

Graphics this week was able develop an interface for rendering 3d objects, the simplest of which is a cube:

And then we moved on to multiple cubes:

We anticipate that graphics might become more and more challenging as we move to texturing and shading, so we are allocating more people to work on graphics (Andrew will be working on graphics with Jaiden). The plan is to divide graphics work into two components - ones related with game systems (first person camera view, camera rotations), and one with the art direction (texture, shading). Hopefully this can relieve some stress on Jaiden, and accelerate graphics development.

Art

Again, there is lots of progress on art this week. John crafted a draft of the bedroom map:

This will give our game design team plenty to work with as we try to export the map and deal with collision. The next milestones for art will be on basic animation for the players, and working with the game design team with complex collisions on particular areas in the map, specifically bookshelves and drawers.

Game Design & Networking

Due to being bottlenecked by the graphics API, the major milestone for game design and networking this week was integrating input/output from multiple clients.

Though the client currently cannot display multiple objects (this was complete before the four cubes demo), proper collision checking is implemented within the server, and different clients are able to display different objects.

The next major milestone for the team is to incorporate these with updated graphics so that a 3D world can finally be rendered in the client. Then, we must implement proper movement logic and camera movement.

Chase has reported that there seems to be some jitter/lag when one machine concurrently runs the server and multiple clients - we will investigate into the issue by profiling to check if it is due to the single threaded server - if that is the case, we may switch to a multithreaded architecture for the server.

Morale Statement

Though there were some setbacks this week due to not reaching the original goal, our team is focused on completing the MVP as soon as possible so we can begin playtesting and implementing gameplay features. Next week will be busy for many of our members, but we will still get work done.