Newsletter – Week 6 – “Production Updates”

Prototype Presentation

Week six started with our weekly client meeting and a presentation to them of our close to final design idea. It also included a brief demonstration of a prototype layout walk-around we created using project SIGMA’s codebase. Finally, we presented the model vehicle we created for use in the game. These were all well received by the client and we spent the week continuing to refine the design and draw up a final design document.

Production Begins

This week we began to dive into the production process sorting out existing code and creating our own to begin the development process fully. Organizationally, the team spent time reworking our project tracking and management solution to better communicate the work we are doing. A finalized game design document will also be finished shortly. On the programming side, we have tried to work through a number of solutions to address GM’s network restrictions; we believe we have found a workaround. In a related vein, we have also begun the process of designing the MySQL database as well as working with Unity and ensuring it is able to integrate with the database. The gameplay programmers reworked last semester’s code for this week’s prototype and will now revise and rewrite the code, while maintaining a similar experience, for this coming week. Algorithms for handling automated path finding and our backend ranking system have also been worked on. 3D modeling has also been going well with our manufacturing machine models having been created and readied for animation.

Technical Challenges

The situation with our client’s firewall has continued to be a problem and it has now been established that we will not be able to have any outbound connections from the game that need to reach an outside-of-GM destination. The current plan is to deploy a virtual machine with a MySQL server that will manage these connections. While this is a doable solution, it is far from ideal as updates and game deployment will be contingent on the client updating the VM.

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