Skip to main content

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.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

[FINAL] - Where to find our game

Hello future builders, we're 3 programmer-artists that make up the Seismic Octopus team: Mitchell Koch - lead programmer, game tester, researcher  Priscilla Lo - project manager, sound design, lead 2D artist, programmer, documentation  Maxime Vincent - lead 3D artist, lighting designer, game tester We finished this course in May 2020 with a final release of Build-a-Furniture available on GitHub: https://github.com/Areizza/Build-a-Furniture Although this semester was full of hardships and unprecedented times near the end, we got through it together and are proud to present our simple web-VR game. Check it out and let us know what you think! :)

Sprint 10 - Adding more boxes and lots of scripting

As the final submission draws near, lots of work has yet to be done. Due to time constraints and the lack of resources in light of recent events, we made the decision to cut down our scope by removing VR functionality entirely and focus on desktop-to-desktop connection fully. With new goals in mind, I spent the beginning of the week by adding all the boxes for spawning furniture components. To do so, I started by replacing the blue boxes we used previously with stylised boxes that match the environment better. To tell the player what each box contains, an image of the rendered component is placed on each side. The challenge here was that I wanted to avoid creating a GLTF for every single box because it would have slowed down the page drastically. The solution was to instead use a single, universal GLTF for every box and placed images on each side of the box as explained previously (~6hrs). New Warehouse Area - Added new boxes Close up of updated box - Bright colours and side ...

Making Instructions

This week, I worked on creating all the instructions images for both the Warehouse and the Living Room. Although this was not a very difficult task, it was tedious to work on and took around 3hrs to complete. It was a challenge to adjust to our new schedules given the current circumstances and allot appropriate time to spend on each of our classes. The instructions in the Living Room show the current required furniture pieces and their quantities, which the Builder will need to communicate to the Finder in the Warehouse. See below for an example of pieces required for a table. On the other hand, the instructions in the Warehouse would show the symbols on the different furniture pieces that should touch in order to be combined, which the Finder will need to communicate to the Builder in the Living Room. See below for an example where the green heart marking should be made to touch the green circle marking. I will be putting the source link for these instructions into arr...