Alex's Week 9 Report

what were your concrete goals for the week?

My goals were to make the game look less bland, implement a new aiming system, and help around with implementing tasks.

what goals were you able to accomplish?

None of these, though I did put in a lot of work into the first one. I implemented some basic bloom, and it's definitely better than nothing.
I guess I helped with implementing tasks, since I spent the entirety of Tuesday morning merging pull requests. One can't say they know how to use git until they merge six successive pull requests. This also helped me understand the server-side codebase a lot better.

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 met with someone who works in the game industry as an environmental artist, and got some ideas of things to implement.
In order of rising difficulty, they were: little client-side particles in space to better show movement, half-lambert shading, character inking, and volumetric fog.
Instead of taking the freebies, I spent two days bashing both my and claude's heads into trying to implement volumetric fog, but this ended up being way too difficult, and I was left with either a more colorful skybox, or horror game-like fog, with no fog dropoff functions seeming to work.

what are your specific goals for the next week?

True volumetric fog may be too hard, but after I implement the other easier graphics things, I'll probably just implement very light, simple fog, so that very far away objects are only shown as silhouettes - the point is I don't think it's good if everything in the world is visible at all times.
I don't believe these will be too hard. Depending on how much help my group needs with other parts of the game, I will either help them out, or keep diving headfirst into graphics.

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

Working through the LearnOpenGL guide doesn't teach you all of computer graphics...
Also, more importantly, I didn't really have any idea how to make the game look better before now. I now know that at least for the state we're at now, I just have to add more of anything, since there is really nothing interesting going on on the screen right now.

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

Good but also tired. I feel like there aren't enough hours in the day to dedicate to my responsibilities.