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JSON to HTML, Spawning Objects, and Graphics

A major task I worked on this week for the Beta presentation was a function to convert the JSON I created with all the furniture parts information into HTML entities that could be added to the scene when "spawned". This took around 6hrs and I learned that JavaScript does not take well to retrieving property names containing dashes in in JSON. This led to issues with trying to directly convert from using the property names stored in JSON with the associated values, since the properties needed dashes to work as an A-Frame entity in HTML.

I also initially had some challenges with querying the JSON objects since the data for each furniture piece is contained in the furniture object, therefore the query must account for multiple layers of arrays. However, the object spawning now works as tested in the Warehouse environment by clicking on specific boxes (which have yet to be labeled). I will be adding the other box spawners once the furniture parts 3D models are ready to be imported.

This week I also worked on improving the index.html page (see screenshot below) since it was originally just the Living Room environment with two clickable cubes, one to go to each respective scene. This took around 2hrs to create the images and implement the clicking functionality leading to the different pages.


After the coronavirus precautions began, I became a bit preoccupied with some other things but I was still able to finish the aforementioned tasks for this sprint. With the school closed down for all non-essential operations, we have some difficulties with renting a VR headset to test our game prototype with. This unexpected limitation may inevitably lead to a change in our scope.

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[WEEK 1] Introducing our project...

Our goal is to make a cool VR game for Design Studio 3. The main idea involves a collaborative asymmetrical experience to build furniture virtually. There will be two roles in this game: a finder (to look for furniture pieces in the warehouse), and a builder (putting the parts together). We started this project on January 22, 2020 and are currently on our first 1 week sprint of development.

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

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