WEEK 1

April 19, 2018

GROUP STATUS REPORT

Weekly Status

As a whole, we’ve all met our goals for the past week. We’ve drafted concept art and settled on a general theme and aesthetic for the game, and also finalized the particular features and goals that we want our game to accomplish.

Here is a breakdown of things in summary:

Networking and Game Logic: Set up a server with the ability to communicate with multiple clients. Basic communication can cause the clients to see a cube moving around depending on their input.
Graphics: set up assimp and created a system to load and render .obj models, organized rendering code to make it easier to add/render new game objects in the future

Meeting Dates

Friday, April 13

Tuesday, April 17 @ 10 am

Wednesday April 18 @ 1 pm

Thursday, April 19 @ 10 am (official meeting with professor)

Group Morale

Morale is quite high - everyone is very eager to begin work on this project, and our discord server blows up with messages at 1 am in the morning! As such, setup has gone smoothly, and our group communication is great. Hopefully, this optimism and enthusiasm translates into later weeks as the real work begins. Score: 9/10

Screenshots

Enemy Characters

Player Characters

INDIVIDUAL STATUS REPORTS

Leon Medvinsky

What were your concrete goals for the week?

Implement a framework for exchanging and processing player input and server state updates

What goals were you able to accomplish?

Implemented a framework for exchanging and processing player input and server state updates, using rpclib
Helped configure Travis CI to build the project

If there were goals you were unable to meet, what were the reasons?

N/A

What are your specific goals for the next week?

Expand the protocol to allow synchronizing non-player objects (flag, game map?) as needed to support gameplay

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

(Unexpected) The VC++ compiler is nonconformant because it mangles structs and class symbols differently, making them not interchangeable. GCC-mangled symbols are the same for both.
(Unexpected) Uninitialized data is more likely to be zero on Linux
(Expected) Rpclib API and limitations

(Unexpected) Rpclib provides no guaranteed way to be notified when a client connects or disconnects, unless the clients are non-buggy and non-malicious.
(Unexpected) Rpclib’s official reference has holes in its documentation

(Unexpected) Glm vectors do not have a zero-initializing default constructor

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

8/10 - I feel good about my own work, but am unclear on what we are planning to have done for the demo.

Chris Ozawa

What were your concrete goals for the week?

Abstract background matrix operations for models and camera to be simpler for interactions with other aspect of the game code.

What goals were you able to accomplish?

I created a camera class, which holds camera position/direction vectors as well as perspective/view matrices. These values were originally hardcoded into ClientPlayer’s Draw method but have now been incorporated into a Camera object that is used by the client.

If there were goals you were unable to meet, what were the reasons?

Not all of the abstraction has been completed, specifically in regard to the player’s transforms, as I stumbled onto some Visual Studio problems that made camera implementation take longer than expected. Being aware of these issues will be helpful moving forward though, and this abstraction should be very doable over the next week.

What are your specific goals for the next week?

Finishing the transform and other abstractions as stated above, and more rendering for graphics. We currently have a cube as a representation of the player, but we’ll want to have our basic room and the important game objects in the near future.

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

So far, a lot was reviewing material from CSE 167. Had to do some refreshing to get myself back up to speed on graphics, which took some time. Also, Visual Studio has some pretty inexplicable errors sometimes. First time I noticed was when Jimmy had problems building code from a branch that I and a few others were able to build, but it was even more apparent as I started writing the code for abstracting the camera and stumbled upon some rather bizarre errors regarding unresolved external symbols and a flickering inability to recognize some of my includes. After lots of head scratching and Jimmy suggesting I rebuild from scratch, the bizarre errors vanished and were replaced by errors that were a lot more sensible and easier to fix. Strange behavior is something I probably should have been a bit more prepared for, but I hadn’t anticipated that what popped up would ultimately be so irrelevant to the actual errors in my code. It’s good to be aware of sooner than later though.

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

I guess about a 7/10. Sometimes I worry that I’m a lot slower than the people around me, but my team is very helpful and reliable when I have an excess of questions so I’m pretty sure things will be okay.

Paula Quach

What were your concrete goals for the week?

Establish a baseline understanding of what we’re doing (goals, etc.), establish a client (or multiple clients) and server and make sure they can communicate.

What goals were you able to accomplish?

We decided on goals and schedules and our code does have client and server code for moving a box around.

If there were goals you were unable to meet, what were the reasons?

Technically, I feel like I didn’t contribute much as I didn’t do any of the coding.

What are your specific goals for the next week?

Actually help out with features and coding.

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

I expected to (and actually did) learn about the game loop and server-client communication in it. I did not expect to learn about new c++ aspects like std::move. Less technically, I learned Visual Studio runs really slow on my laptop...

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

7/10 - I feel a bit lost in our code but I’m optimistic I can catch up and then help contribute.

Jack Wang

What were your concrete goals for the week?

Build up basic physics engine which can handle basic movements and collisions.

Set up skeleton code for inputs.

What goals were you able to accomplish?

Both

If there were goals you were unable to meet, what were the reasons?

N/A

What are your specific goals for the next week?

Code structure review and implement game plays

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

Bullet library :)

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

8/10

Jimmy Ye

What were your concrete goals for the week?

Establish reasonable goals for all sub-teams, especially general architecture/design, so that the code will be in a good state for integration, and make sure that the group as a whole is on the same page, aware of their responsibilities, etc.

Get basic input code working and integrated with networking/physics/graphics. Set up private GitHub repository with continuous integration. Organize and track tasks systematically.

What goals were you able to accomplish?

We did establish good initial designs with achievable goals. Some members of the team are not as clear yet on the overall design plans, in particular their own immediate objectives, but we are working on better organization/communication.

Basic input code is working and integrated with other components. Our GitHub repo is set up with CI using Travis, and we've begun tracking tasks and doing mini code reviews using GitHub's issues system.

If there were goals you were unable to meet, what were the reasons?

N/A

What are your specific goals for the next week?

Get our short demo working (as per our checkpoint/milestone), and keep our code in a good state for accommodating our future changes. Since we're also planning on focusing more effort on gameplay and graphics rather than networking, I'm planning on checking in with everyone to make sure that networking reaches near-completion soon (at least for the features that we can foresee needing) and begin planning for a larger number of features for gameplay/graphics.

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

GitHub workflow (using issues/PRs), continuous integration, notification webhooks, CMake build architecture. Somewhat expected.

Various APIs across the components we are using (e.g. Bullet for physics, GLFW for windowing). Expected.

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

8/10. We are being productive, yay!

Jamie Zhang

What were your concrete goals for the week?

Set up the code to be able to render a simple object.
Render a room and players.

What goals were you able to accomplish?

Added code to load and render sample model (cube) given by Vivian
Restructure code to make it easy to switch between models/add new renderable objects

If there were goals you were unable to meet, what were the reasons?

Did not render the room yet due to lack of time/model but I believe it should be very easy with the current code.

What are your specific goals for the next week?

Render crucial objects for gameplay (i.e. flag, environment)
Render HP/damage indicator

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

I learned a bit of cmake and how to get it to work better with VS. (semi-expected, but I didn’t expect for there to be so much trouble)

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

7/10

Vivian Zhang

What were your concrete goals for the week?

Week 2 goals were to draft concept art and finalize the general art style and aesthetic of our game.

What goals were you able to accomplish?

I was able to accomplish all of the above - I have a firm grasp of what we want our game to look like, and have multiple drafts of player and enemy designs, as well as general dungeon rooms. In addition, I’ve also begun modeling the dungeon rooms, albeit bare and basic, ahead of schedule and in preparation for future weeks.

If there were goals you were unable to meet, what were the reasons?

N/A

What are your specific goals for the next week?

Model a basic character mold for the graphics team to use (so they no longer have to work with a cube) and model one of the designed player characters (the warrior).

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

As I started modeling the basic dungeon rooms this week, I began learning 3D-modeling on Blender. I did expect to learn this, and expect to go even more in depth as I start working on more detailed models (e.g. character designs and clothing, textures, etc).

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

8/10 - I am a little worried about the learning curve with Blender as I move on to more complicated models, but I am optimistic and confident that I will be able to learn quickly as I go.