The End is Here

It is so hard to believe that classes are about to be over in only a few more days. This semester seemed to fly by without my noticing. I think my experience in this Software Engineering Practicum class has been great. I have learned so many things despite the fact that we were somewhat on our own and had to be self-motivated to get things done. 

I did not learn Python here at CofC because I took Programming I at Winthrop University where we learned C++ instead of Python. This class project provided a chance to really understand Python because I basically needed to in order to contribute. 

Working on our open-source project, Fortune Hunter, was also an amazing experience. I was taken back by how enthusiastic and helpful the Sugar and Math4 open-source community was with us trying to contribute. We were in constant contact with Jon Meschino through the semester and even had some people subscribe to our team wiki! 

You could say that our experience working with open-source projects in CSCI 362 was at the Knowledge or Comprehension level of Bloom's Taxonomy and CSCI 462 was at the Application or Analysis level.

Other great tools that I will be able to take away from this class is experience using git/svn and NetBeans. I was not really exposed to many IDEs before this class but I have come to find that I thoroughly enjoy using NetBeans. I actually started using it for my Operating Systems class this semester.

Overall, I think our group did very well. We all worked great together and helped each other when needed. We are presenting our poster for Fortune Hunter tomorrow which will also help us put together our final presentation for class. The last thing to do is export this blog and say farewell!

Finishing Up!

I met with Brittany today to provide my screenshots for the poster we are creating. We will hopefully submit it today as well so that it can be reviewed and printed in good time.

Currently, I am working with Ryan to implement the animated graphics. When the player casts the lightning spell successfully, we would like a lightning bolt to flash a couple of times on the screen. I have been able to load the lightning image after the user successfully casts the spell, however, now I have to animate it. The Fortune Hunter project uses a sprite sheet to animate images (currently there is an animated dragon). I have never used/seen a sprite sheet before so I will just have to do a little research for this. Brittany also emailed the mailing list to get some further information on this for me. However, I feel we should definitely be able to accomplish this!

The next step is to continue working on our presentation and exporting our blogs and wiki.

No Such Victory

I was having a really hard time with loading a victory screen in the Fortune Hunter game. In version one of the game, whenever the player defeated all enemies in the room, a victory screen would appear. This screen would let the player know that he/she has won and display information about what they won. Seeing as it might be difficult to find out how to locate this information (what the user won after the battle) I was just trying to display a victory screen that would simply indicate that the player won (since there was really no other indication of this). For some reason, I was able to make the victory screen appear after the defeat of each enemy but not after they all were defeated. After spending a couple of days on this, I decided to just move on to something else so that I might have a chance of actually contributing to the project. (I did make changes to the code so that when the player defeated an enemy, a message in the message center on the bottom would read "Enemy Defeated!". So at least now the player has some form of indication that they have won.)

Ryan still had some work to do with completing his task so we decided to collaborate and I will help with adding the new graphics to the game. Since there will now be two people working at this, we will hopefully be able to accomplish this and we could continue with other tasks.

Tuesday - April 12th

I do not have much to update for today. We are all still steadily working on our project though. Today we are going to review our abstract that Brittany has started for our poster for Fortune Hunter.

I will update after class with any further news.

Project - Presentation - Poster

Our group, Four's Company, seems to be progressing along just fine. We are nearing the end of the semester so there is homework and papers left and right for all classes. This will prove our determination if we can fight until the finish line and come out with a great experience and contribution.

Each of us are still working on our tasks for the Fortune Hunter game and appear to be right on schedule. We will begin thinking about/designing our presentation soon - especially since we will have to turn in an outline for our presentation to Dr. Bowring. Our group has also decided to create a poster for the 23rd Annual Scientific Research Poster Session. I have never done this before so it will be really fun and exciting to share with others what my group and I have been working on all semester long! Hopefully, we will have time to make this poster really nice.

Three weeks and counting!

My group met up over the weekend to work on our project. I think this meeting was very beneficial because we all actually got to sit down together and discuss our ideas and the code. We were able to help each other throughout the whole time we were there.

Ryan and I discovered that the tasks we were working on separately, are essentially doing the same thing. We are both trying to upload pictures to the screen at different points throughout the game. Therefore, we were able to collaborate and work together. We were able to find the code that is used to pop up a picture on the screen.

Ryan would like to display a pile of bones when an enemy is killed and we do have that image appearing on the screen, so our next step is to figure out the right placement of the picture and how to get more than one picture to appear (one for each enemy that is killed).

My goal is to have a victory image that will appear after the player has killed all enemies in one dungeon, right before they move on to the next dungeon. Now that we should be able to display the picture, I will just need to create the gif image.

We are keeping our Team Wiki up to date by writing about any changes we have made to the game. Our timeline page that lists what we have accomplished and what we plan to accomplish is steadily growing by the day!

Update on my Task

Currently, I am working on adding the Victory Screen into version 2 of the Fortune Hunter game (from version 1). Version 1 of the game will not play on my Sugar OS in Virtual Box so I have not been able to see the victory screen. I have the source code in NetBeans so I did a search for "Victory" and found that they were using a "VictoryScreen.gif" image. I found this in the MAFH.activity folder but it is simply another image of the hand and the little menu in the hand. So I wasn't sure what to do with this. For now, I just have the message on the handheld menu read "You Win!" when the player defeats and enemy and also added a message at the bottom that reads "You have defeated your enemy".

Four's Company Team Progress

This week, our team has progressed even further with our bug fixes.

We were not sure how to find Dungeon 3 in the Fortune Hunter game but Jaime found the line of code where we could change the amount of damage caused by "attack" is 40 instead of 10. Therefore we could just breeze through the game to look for Dungeon 3 and we did eventually find it and saw the bug where you are stuck in dungeon 3 and cannot move further. We were also having trouble even viewing the game on our laptops because of a screen resolution issue and Jaime found a way for us to scale our machines so that we could reach a large enough screen resolution. This was very helpful for being able to understand more of the Fortune Hunter game. Now, the next step is to get moving on implementing our bug fixes!

POSSCON Experience

Unfortunately, I have been really really really busy this week with tests and programs and homework and studying which caused my blog to be put on hold - momentarily! However, even though I did not blog previously, I do have much to say about the POSSCON event.

It was very exciting to go to this conference because it was an open source software conference but also because I have never been to a conference before. It was awesome that Dr. Bowring was able to have vans for us so that we didn't have to pay for gas driving ourselves to Columbia. The drive was only about an hour and a half but it was nice to just be along for the ride instead of driving.

The conference was held in the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center and it was organized very well. As soon as you entered the building you were greeted, registered, and then served muffins and coffee for breakfast.

The sponsors for the conference had set up booths set up for questions and information. The Linode booth was giving out free t-shirts and naturally, we all stopped by. I actually did speak with one of the girls at Linode because she said she was doing web design/development. I would like to look into Ruby on Rails now after speaking with her because it might be a language I will need to know in the future.

Our task for the day was to pick three presenters and ask them questions. The first presenter I wanted to speak with was Chris Hinkley. There are a few minutes after the presentations when you are free to ask questions but I did not want to ask questions in front of other people so I decided to wait until afterwards. However, since this was my first conference I was just following along with the crowd on to the next session and I ended up missing out on speaking with Chris Hinkley.

The next presenter I wanted to speak with was Walter Bender, founder of Sugar Labs. I loved his presentation which was created using one of the Sugar activities. After his brief overview of what Sugar Labs is he showed everyone on of the OLPC laptops and the Sugar OS. He also showed us an activity created while on the plane coming to Columbia! (Although he was coming from Norway). There are three groups in our Software Engineering class that are working on Sugar activities and we all attended his presentation. Afterwards, we all went up to meet Walter Bender and to tell him about the activities we were working on. He made suggestions for the activities but seemed pretty happy to see we were actively helping. My questions to him were about how he managed to stay employed and also contribute so much to OLPC and Sugar Labs which can only give back the satisfaction of helping the children. I was mainly asking because most of us are seniors and we will be headed out to find jobs in the work industry which does not include open source projects. So, how could we manage our time if we wanted to continue contributing to open source? Walter Bender just basically said that is has to be something that you love doing since it will be done in your spare time. Also that you cannot expect to just jump into a project and be able to accomplish everything all at once. You have to learn languages and processes and just take your time.

I also spoke with the 3D printer guys. They had a booth at the conference and they were displaying the printer. The printer was actually printing an Android phone holder while we were there. I spoke with one of the guys about how the printer works and it basically just feeds in plastic, melts it down, and spins it out to create an object. One of the guys even showed me his 3D scanner which will scan a picture of an object using an camera and then the data can be sent over to the printer to replicated the object! He joked about printing out his cell phone face plate in every color, but this is a really cool idea.

All in all, POSSCON was a fantastic experience. I did not win the Samsung Galaxy tablet at the give away, but it was all worth attending. I am so happy to have been able to attend.