Ryan Crim_PPJs_wk09
Ryan Crim, Week 9 Journal
This week there was a lot of fleshing out in the game in terms of setting up the actual level, including fully populating it with items, and adding in the final cart design. In addition, there were improvements that needed to be made, especially in terms of performance as it seems to have been a serious issue with our Alpha 02 build.
To begin the week, I looked into the control issue that we had experienced during the demo to the class last week, which was causing the 2-player mode to not work. It appeared to be that the project settings from some of the controls had not updated in Perforce correctly, but the real issue we found was that trying to play with one wired controller and one wireless controller at the same time had weird side effects. While it seems to be okay now, we'll keep an eye on this to make sure no other issues occur. (0.50 hr)
The next task of mine was to convert the 2D interactive start screen from the previous build into a 3D version using the real assets from our game, see Figure 1 for the “finished version.” This required building a separate area to hold a mock-up of an aisle with a controllable cart that did not send data to the motion base. In addition, I updated the UI to show only buttons as opposed to full controllers, and I prototyped a system to have the UI button elements react to when a player presses a button on their controller. (4.00 hrs)
Figure 1.3D version of the interactive start screen
Next on my list was to animate the arms in Unity. Over the past few weeks, animating the arms was going to be done by Ricardo in Maya, however, it was always pushed back due to being a lower priority. Having thought about it, I figured that given the time constraints it might be easy to just script it in Unity, so I created a script to lerp an arm between different rotations depending on the user’s input and it works pretty well. However, the path the rotation takes is not easily discernable, so I spent a significant amount of time trying to not only get the animations to look right, but to clear up differences between the left and right arm. Eventually, I remembered that scaling in the negative direction flipped objects, so I duplicated the left arm, scaled it to -1 in all the axes, rotated it into place and it worked identically to the left arm. This trick saved me a significant amount of time, and makes the whole process of changing the arm animations a little easier. (5.50 hrs)
Now, the heft majority of my work this week included updating the cart and populating the new level (created by Ricardo and implanted in Unity by John) with all of the items and posters. The cart was not too difficult to replace at all, and it allowed me to reorganize a few different aspects of how we have the cart set-up, see Figure 2 for a look at the new cart. However, the process of adding all of the items was a very monotonous and drawn out task since I could not find an easy way to script it. After a significant amount of time and effort, though, we now have a full store that will provide players with a lot more options than they have had in previous builds, some of which can be seen in Figure 3. Also to note, the number of items on a shelf has been significantly reduced in order to try to help out with the performance issues we have been experiencing. (6.50 hrs)
Figure 2. Updated cart model in the game
Figure 3. Overview of all the products
The last effort I put into the game this week was to update the end screen to look a little more appealing by adding color, custom fonts and Jinghan’s images for it, which can all be seen in Figure 4. (0.25 hrs)
Figure 4. Updated end screen for the game
Besides making updates to the game, I also contributed on the art side by modelling the alarm clock and hammer in Maya for my store in the level. I also created a few different box textures using the template provided by Ricardo, as shown in Figure 5. (1.00 hr)
Lastly, I made updates to the website to contain more information about the game and the ride, as well as generated a shortened URL to the site to more easily understand. (0.50 hr)
Positives:
Created more effective interactive start screen
Added animation of arms, updated cart and all of the items into the new scene
Cleaned up the end game screens
Modelled and created box textures
Negatives:
Did not have enough time to animate/provide sounds for the vacuums or to add Jinghan’s art to the interactive start screen
Was not able to get a lot of playtest data due to the performance issues in the previous build
Total Hours for the week: 18.25 hrs
