Saturday, June 21 2014
Well, here we are, the end of Senior Project and the end of my career at DeVry. I am really excited to be done and to get on with my career, wherever that may take me. I am grateful for all of the friends I have made and for the professors who made the program fun and interactive.
Anyways, onto the project details. Since we are in the final few days of the session, we are all scrambling to fix little bugs and mistakes and get things ready for the final build and presentation. We have a trailer to put together, websites to make (for ourselves) and a host of bugs to fix. I FINALLY GOT THE PHYSICS TO WORK. I feel really dumb about it, as I was using a few wrong formulas, not to mention that the actual temperature of the atmosphere is not linear in terms of height, but more of a piece-wise function. So, it works really well now, and that model I found at the beginning of the project really helped me out. Since fixing the physics, I have been working on getting the 3 cinematics for the game ready to be implemented. I finished the final one earlier today, and used the same process as in one of my earlier blogs from the previous half of Senior Project. However, I used a different conversion software this time around, as the last time I converted the video files, they did not work at all in Android. They work now, we are just trying to iron out some resolution issues we are having. Android devices come in all shapes and sizes, and with different sized screens. Finding a resolution for the videos that will look nice on all of them is a real pain. But, I did learn a lot more about 3DS Max and animation than I knew before. So, at least I learned something.
I do not know if/when the game will be released, as it is a client based project and our client just so happens to be our professor. The entire game was his idea, our group was just the vehicle for bringing it to life. He has some plans for after we graduate, which I will not detail here. It may or may not come out, and I may or may not announce that on this blog. So, keep your eyes peeled on the Google Play Store and here to see if it gets released or not. We are all very proud of how far it has come in a short 16 weeks. We took an entirely code approach to this project, and I couldn't be happier with the results. Even though none of us are professional artists, the game looks really nice. We plan on entering it in the DeVry Senior Project Showdown. Google it and vote when voting opens. Take us to the top!
Since this is my final blog of my DeVry career, I do not know when/if I will be back here. I hope to keep on making games in my spare time, and might detail them here. Or I might make this into a place of learning for the code newbies who scour Google and blogs for hints and tips on programming. Who knows? Right now I am focused on my job search, as is to be expected of someone who is graduating in 8 days.
As always, thanks for reading and staying with me through all of these years. I enjoyed blogging about my projects, and I hope you enjoyed reading about them. Maybe you even learned a thing or two.
Saturday, June 21, 2014
Monday, June 9, 2014
Dev Blog #1
Monday, June 9 2014
It is now Week 6 of the second portion of Senior Project, and I probably should have done this blog awhile ago. However, things have been moving quickly with the project. We have an animation system in place to animate the space jumper as he does his tasks in Phase 1, a media player for cinematics (which was supposed to be done in the first half of this class, but I won't go into details), acclerometer controls, improved models and ones that didn't make it into the first half of this class, and a bunch of other things that I am probably forgetting. Anyways, onto my problems with the project.
I was told by one of our other members that my physics was off. I knew things needed to be tweaked and worked on, but what I did not realize is that the way I am calculating temperature as a function of height was completely wrong. Take a look at the picture at the following link:
Click here to see picture
As you can see, the temperature in the Earth's atmosphere is more or less a piece-wise function. It is rather strange, as you would think that going higher in the atmosphere would make you colder. Well, it does, for the most part. But between 10-20 Km above sea level, the temperature doesn't change at all, and there are some other weird things going on as you go higher. So, using some linear algebra, I was able to come up with some formulas for how to solve for temperature given some height. The way I was doing the calculations was strictly linear. As you can see by the graph, its not linear. For example, the temperature that was calculated in the first update call came out as 40 degrees Kelvin... yea not right at all. At that height, temperature is more like 248 degrees Kelvin (or around there). My temperature calculations still rely on height, but the formulas are different for different ranges of height. There are 4 different ranges, with heights between 10000-20000 meters not changing at all (as per the graph).
It seems to work better now. I should probably get going on the other 2 cinematics that I have to do for the game, as our professor wants us done by Wednesday.
It is now Week 6 of the second portion of Senior Project, and I probably should have done this blog awhile ago. However, things have been moving quickly with the project. We have an animation system in place to animate the space jumper as he does his tasks in Phase 1, a media player for cinematics (which was supposed to be done in the first half of this class, but I won't go into details), acclerometer controls, improved models and ones that didn't make it into the first half of this class, and a bunch of other things that I am probably forgetting. Anyways, onto my problems with the project.
I was told by one of our other members that my physics was off. I knew things needed to be tweaked and worked on, but what I did not realize is that the way I am calculating temperature as a function of height was completely wrong. Take a look at the picture at the following link:
Click here to see picture
As you can see, the temperature in the Earth's atmosphere is more or less a piece-wise function. It is rather strange, as you would think that going higher in the atmosphere would make you colder. Well, it does, for the most part. But between 10-20 Km above sea level, the temperature doesn't change at all, and there are some other weird things going on as you go higher. So, using some linear algebra, I was able to come up with some formulas for how to solve for temperature given some height. The way I was doing the calculations was strictly linear. As you can see by the graph, its not linear. For example, the temperature that was calculated in the first update call came out as 40 degrees Kelvin... yea not right at all. At that height, temperature is more like 248 degrees Kelvin (or around there). My temperature calculations still rely on height, but the formulas are different for different ranges of height. There are 4 different ranges, with heights between 10000-20000 meters not changing at all (as per the graph).
It seems to work better now. I should probably get going on the other 2 cinematics that I have to do for the game, as our professor wants us done by Wednesday.
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