Another week, another sprint

As a group, there are still some things we need to do to finish porting but we are essentially back at our masters studio demo stage. I've assigned tasks to everyone which primarily include polishing, optimizing, and getting the game on xbox to run smoothly. I am still working on the collision detection and will have Pace work with me to finalize it for this week.

XNA 4.0 conversion continued

So our entire group is still working on converting to 4.0 and we're making progress. The majority of the team have finished porting over. For this class period, I've been adding more to the collision detection system and will continue to do so most likely even after the sprint ends. This is simply because I will most likely need to do numerous stress tests to find the optimal solution for the collision detection. I have also begun planning out and assigning tasks for the next sprint. I think the primary goal for this upcoming sprint will to get what we have now to not crash on the xbox 360, begin to assign someone on dealing with the evil list, and then polish what we have working now. Interestingly, it seems like the amount we spend going from 0% complete to about 80% complete takes as much time as going from 80% to 100%. That last bit takes a lot of work because we have to balance gameplay, visually make the game look nice, and make the game feel fluid.

For my task, I've had to spend alot of time with the collision system. I am currently applying a spatial hash which splits up the worldspace into tiny cubes. We can then represent each cube with an id in which our hash consists of the id of the cube and contains a list of all the objects in that cube. By doing this, we then perform collision detection against objects in their own cube space. This cuts down and eliminate collision checks against objects which may reside in a very faraway point.

New sprint

For this sprint, we will be focused entirely on conversion to 4.0 Each person will be responsible for porting what they have been working on. For Pace, he'll be porting the pod system, James will be fixing the lasers and porting the AI, Wilson and Jason will be working on the screens and then improving it to fit our game modes, CP will be working on a scoreboard system, and I will be focused on retooling the collision detection system. For the past week, I've simply gone through our code and manually port over the project. This has taken a surprisingly long amount of time because of changes made to xna as well as making the code more robust this time around.

Presentation to Masters Students

Today is we finalized a playable demo for the masters students to play test. We were able to make quite a bit of progress this past few days and I am ecstatic to say that we are close to having a fully playable game mode. Currently it is mostly complete but should be finished in the next couple of weeks. For today, I continue to convert our project to xna 4.0 while cleaning up code and doing some optimization at the same time. It's taken a surprising amount of time but doing this have definitely made the code look simpler and gives everything much more structure. Because we have just been adding functionality, many variables and methods were never thought of until a particular function had to be added. Now that we have a better sense, the restructure has made our code much more robust. By next time, I plan to continue to work on the conversion to xna 4.0 as well as getting the next sprint started. My plan is to get everyone to work on different parts of the code and convert it to 4.0

Start of first spring sprint

I am now the scrum master for the team. Professor Kessler and Altizer decided it would be best to split up the tech lead/scrum master role so that I am now the scrum master and James will be the tech lead. I've continue converting our project to the xna 4.0 version of it while cleaning up some of the code during the conversion. I've assigned tasks to all of our programmers and have notified charlie to assign tasks for the art group. Our priority for this sprint is to finalize all core code such as battle mechanics as well as converting most/all core game code into XNA 4.0. Primarily we are finalizing and fixing bugs that we've found to create a good playable game by tuesday as well as finish our 4.0 conversion as soon as possible so there will be no down time when everyone else need to switch from the old project to the new one.

Spring Semester

Heading towards the end, we are projecting about 6-8 more weeks of beta phase. We have been continually stripping down more and more of the original game. As of now, we are going to end the mission select concept and only add a survival mode where waves of enemies swarm and the player strives to get a high score. I have also began the conversion to 4.0 while cleaning up some of the code we have implemented but never used.