Monday 28 July 2008

Working with model mapping

I’ve started to work with model mapping framework on last week. It required to reimplement or copy a bunch of methods from EmberPhysicalEntity and satellite classes. It didn’t satify me well and I made an attempt to reuse EmberPhysicalEntity directly but it wasn’t very successful. I’m thinking that it in some places assumes entity properly belong to entity hierarchy. Making it to support detached entity seems to require some changes there. So I decided to drop this attempt and continue to work with model mapping directly to render preview mesh correctly. And that’s what I’m going to do for next week.

Monday 21 July 2008

Entity positioning

On last week I’ve made terrain positioning of new entities. It allows to see position where entity will be created. But the preview mesh isn’t the same as entity that will be created.

This is the goal for next week—make preview fully represent new entity. To achieve this, I need to implement Erik’s plan on DetachedEntity class and feeding it to model mapping framework. This is partially done but not commited yet.

Also, user interface should be improved—it should stay in “create” mode after creating first entity and allow create fast as many more entities as user wants. Also minor things like changing orientation on mouse scroll should be made.

Monday 14 July 2008

More OGRE bits


Performing ritual

Last week I spend looking and learning on what should be done during the second part of program.

The main feature that should be implemented is easy entity positioning. This means that while moving mouse over terrain it should show preview of entity that will be created. Positioning of entity with mouse was recently implemented by Sean and Erik. So I need to implement showing imaginary preview or bounding box in the world. This carried me in deeply in Ember internals. I’m guessing that this task could simply be solved with some OGRE bits and intercepting some controls but I didn’t find my way to it yet.

Monday 7 July 2008

It’s working!


On last week I’ve finally made my program work! Thus finishing goal for first part of program just in time. As there comes a time for midterm survey, I’ll make a summary of what has been already done.

So, at the moment we have a program that can do following basic things:
  • parse entity recipes,
  • show widget,
  • show GUI adapters from entity recipe on its widget,
  • pass adapters values to Lua function that is specified in entity recipe,
  • compose entity replacing placeholders in entity specification with values received from Lua function or from adapter directly,
  • send entity to server.

Regarding on what to do next, it needs at least:
  • improving GUI—like adding title to adapters, etc.,
  • adding preview of new entity,
  • using mouse-to-terrain feature to place entities and
  • improve current code and features.
This should be discussed and corrected after some kind of review of what’s done.

And one more organizational point. I’m going move to the country since next weekdays. Quality of Internet connection there is not good, so, probably, most of time I’ll not be available on IRC/Jabber. Though, I hope, will read email regularly.
And very good that we are using Git—I can commit regardless of connectivity.