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".