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.