Day three finds the Timeline team hunkered down and unwilling to be interviewed for the blog. However, I can tell they are far enough along that Nicole and Kevin R. have selected timeline topics and are collecting data:
Team Marble-ous caught up on deliverables once Paul and Doug fixed a bug, passing the Tuesday 4PM acceptance test at 1:25PM Wednesday. At the same time, Mike accepted the planned Thursday UI and multiuser deliverables. What’s left? Data visualisation, more 3D work on track types, and a stretch goal of sound effects, all due by Friday.
We intentionally did very little pre-work on these projects, since the team was working hard on feature freeze in the preceding weeks. As the projects unfold this week, we can see that the two projects are, as we intended, exercising different parts of Wonderland.
The Marble Roller Coaster is primarily an exercise in integration (bridging gaps between JME and JBullet, using the HUD to build track as a collaborative activity), filling out some parts of the core (for instance, extensions to MTgame for running physics simulations), and fixing bugs. Simulations are run on each client to avoid network latency problems. The other major issue is managing customer expectations, for instance explaining the limits of JBullet’s capabilities. Here’s the latest prototype snapshot:
More details on the Timeline project when they come up for air on Thursday.
Oh gosh, those icons… I think they would look nicer with transparent backgrounds. I can resubmit through Nigel. Do you need a new track-type "Bump" icon?
Great progress!