January 7, 2007:

I made it my goal over winter break to compile a working release of our project, and I succeeded to some degree. I was able to identify and fix many of the problems that we overlooked or simply did not have enough time for when we were taking the class. However, there's still a lot more I'd like to do before I'm satisfied with it. In addition, this release does not work on all computers, like my laptop which has an older integrated graphics card, or may not display correctly. All I can say is it works better than it did at our final demo. I will continue to work on the project and post another release when it's ready.

Changes:

• Modified Class CIniFile so that it only loads each ini file once (instead of each time it accesses a key/value). Made all its methods non-static so it now needs to be passed a filename when calling its constructor. Updated all files in Client and Server to use these new methods. This was apparently the cause of the sluggish loading times (loading is much faster now).
• Tweaked debug console and added/edited debug messages.
• Added comments to ambiguous code.
• Commented/removed unused code.
• Added "loading screen".
• Added windowed/fullscreen option to inifile.ini.
• Modified Server so that initialization doesn't begin until after the number of players has been entered.
• Fixed problem with login: wasn't checking if connection was successful after user pressed start (went straight to the character selection screen). Now loops through user input and checks connection before proceeding to character selection.
  
• Put hard-coded filepath values into ini files. Created gui.ini and Gui folder. Reorganized resource files and deleted unused ones.
• Fixed escape error: particleManager::shutdown() was accessing indices outside the range of the emitters vector.

To Do List:

• More efficient user input and server (the current implementation hogs all the system's resources)
• Consolidate timers and other multiple instances
• Fix camera
• Finish implementing the "Bear"
• Particle emitter timing
• Improve the GUI
• Switch from client/server model to peer/peer model
• Modifiable runtime user options instead of static ini file
• Model new terrains and improve existing one

Please send your questions/comments/complaints to Kristen (currently the only one working on it). Thanks!

last updated Sunday, January 7, 2007 1:50 AM