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JavaScript Libraries and Flow Charts

This sprint we focused on the laying the groundwork for the project and writing the design document.  For the design document, I outlined the Technical Requirements, Technical Features, Interaction Features, and created a user experience flow chart (~4-5 hours).  The rest of the sprint was spent testing the JavaScript packages we plan to, or are interested in, implementing in the project (~4-6 hours).  

Creating the user experience flow chart took a few iterations as we weren’t certain of the final gameplay.  The current version is fairly linear, but the gameplay is straight forward to make it easy to pick up and play.  


A part of the final user experience flow chart.


The packages I tested for our project were aframe-extras, aframe-physics, and aframe-click-drag-component.  ‘Extras’, as the name suggests, adds some extra functionality to A-Frame, including controller support, ‘Physics’ adds a physics system, while ‘Click-and-Drag’ is supposed to add mouse click and drag support for objects, but I was never able to get it working while testing, so we will likely have to find another option.  I also investigated a few more libraries that could come in use as we continue development:

  • Three.js: the 3D infrastructure for JavaScript that A-Frame is built on.  Using this package will allow for some powerful manipulation of 3D objects in our scenes.
  • Socket.io: supports the implementation of multiplayer servers.
  • Networked A-Frame: A more powerful, A-Frame specific version of Socket.io that has some added features such as voice chat and cross-play support.

Unfortunately, not having a working click and drag system made it difficult to test any modular components, so I was not able to get far with that this past week.


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