Time is short as LexiConquest nears completion. Major things to look forward to at this point are the Library Node and the Cards which were ordered last week.

Mike – Worked on Composites, Announcer V/O, Game progression outline

Ben – Went to War with Shave (and survived!), Rendered Billy, Spell card art

Hessam- Worked on the library, and contact forms of the site

Jason – Game outline, LIBRARY NODE, animations programming, attack Desc programming

Lauren – Re-rendered Tiny Tim’s animations with hair, did final edits on cards, adjusted Hp bar design

Tracy – Re-rendered Frankenstein’s Lightning, Rendered more flames for Graveyard Daemon, worked on fixing Deus Ex Machina in post & composited all of these. Minimally worked on coding while rendering was happening. 14.5 hours @ 90%

Big week for lexiconquest. Cards were ordered, fiberglass finished, animations beginning to get implemented into game. The end is in sight and we are still cruisin along.

To start off Mike and I have reworked the game outline turn by turn. We now have each turn broken down on a spreadsheet so we can easily implement the turn restrictions  in the game. It took a lot of time to make all the changes from the old game outline one of the spells was cut from the game since that point, as well as some attacks being changed. We now have a much more coherent and accurate turn-by-turn outline.

Time spent on game outline: 3 hours

FIBERGLASS FINISHED >>> The fiberglass box is finally complete. I have had time to install the bottom camera but it has yet to be properly calibrated. This will be finally unveiled properly at Tuesday’s meeting. After a lot of sanding (with a respirator this time, Ted!) it is smooth and shiny. Painted in a gorgeous red, it is Library Node!!

Time spent on Library Node: 6 hours

Programming of animations and attack descriptions are complete. At this point attack descriptions will come up if the button is pressed when a character is unable to attack (meaning there have not been enough maneuver cards placed on the character). It will disappear once any other action takes place. Animations now play based on the character ID at the given location of the button being pressed and the function being called. The idle programming still needs to be taken care of, but that’s a bit more complex. Animations are easily updated by simply placing them in an ‘animations’ folder inside the game directory. This makes for super easy updates as the other members don’t have to manipulate the code or game file at all. Just re-compile and it’s all set. Also had to ‘touch-up’ some of the current code to free up resources. Seems that I had the webcam recording near HD video to detect the glyphs!! What a hog! Also had some of the glyph detection code constantly running which is not necessary for our project. Either way video playback is much much smoother now.

Programming Attack Desc and Animations from Jason Miraglia on Vimeo.

Time spent programming: 8 hours

Total Hours: 17 hours @ 90%

Next Week: Library Node properly calibrated and touch interface working from Library Node in game. Idle screen properly coded with animations. Attack title’s implemented. HP bar implemented.

A good majority of this week was spent on programming. Below are two videos demoing what was done programming wise. The first shows all the character glyph artwork I did working in the game and being detected properly. This was a much greater pain than I originally thought it would be. It took a whole heck of a lot of tweaking values in the glyph detection as well as the actual .pat files that FLARTools compares against when detecting if a glyph is present on screen. I also had to tweak the image files a lot to make them each uniquely identifiable from one another. A lot of this hassle could have been remedied by using blocky geometric shapes for the glyph images but these nice looking icons should look miles better on the physical cards as I feel each glyph represents it’s respective character.

http://vimeo.com/11411710

The second video is a demo of the new one button idea I came up with. This was done primarily for simplification of the finger touch tracking. By using one button we should greatly reduce the possibility of mis-pressing multiple buttons from the touch interface.

http://vimeo.com/11412236

Time Spent on Coding: 7 hours

Here is all the glyph artwork for the characters:

Billy Pilgrim

Tripod

Tiny Tim

Tin Man

Robin Hood

King Arthur

Time Spent on Artwork Including Tweaking: 6 hours

Aside from the digital stuff I also went to our shop to work on the fiberglass box. The guy that is doing it for me needed some help sanding it down while he is working on a car fiberglassing project. I spent a good amount of time sanding down the original layers of fiberglass and he helped me put on a final finer fiber glass cloth layer. The only step left is the body filler and then paint. He kind of fell behind on our anticipated completion date of this week due to another project he is getting paid to work on. It will be completed this week with our own matched dark red color. Below are some pictures of it post sanding but before the final layer of fiberglass was installed.

Time spent on fiberglass box: 4 hours

Total Time: 17 hours @ 95%

Next Week:

Animations integrated into game.

Fiberglass box completion.

Integration of electronics into fiberglass box.

UPDATE: We have a near-finished version of the Battle Theme done as well, courtesy of fellow Drexel student Shaun Cerborino:

LexiQuestRough2

Things are starting to really come together. We planned on finishing our rendering by this week and moving everyone into compositing, in the coming week. We are also planning to orders the physical cards this week after out meeting with Ted on Tuesday.

MIKE: Finished King Arthur’s arrival animation, finished rendering. No work done on the announcer audio.

Hessam: Finished Robin’s arrival animation, and all the other renders, and composite all the animations. Worked on the functionality of the site, and browser testing. Total Hours: 17.5 Total Percentage: 97%

Ben: Tin Woodsman Compositing and Billy Pilgrim “bang my head on the desk” type technical issues

Jason: Programming ‘one button’, character glyph artwork and programming. 17 hours @ 95%

Tracy: Rendered out last spell effect (personification), implemented the Quiz game, composited the Time Shift spell effect. 16.5 hours @90%

Lauren: Put together playing cards, re-animated and rendered arrival sequence, and rendered library for attack animation. 23 Hrs, 90%

Ben – Designed book opening visual effect, finished Tin Woodsman’s Arrival Animation, Billy Pilgrim’s Attack

Hessam – Finished damage animation for robin, and the left over renders. Worked on the Image cycle gallery, quick facts callout, user profile page, style for the gallery, and generating font for the website. Total hours: 22 Total Percentage for both the site and 3d Stuff: 95% accomplished.

Jason – Tripod renders complete and all ready for compositing. Defending implemented in code. Hours: 19 @ 95%

Mike -Worked King Arthur Arrival animation, finished the final Book animation continued rendering. 17hrs @90%

Lauren – Finished rendering attack animation character layers, reworked particles and attack animation, animated and set up render for arrival. 19.5 hrs, 85%.

Tracy – Finished rendering 4 of the 5 spell effects and their library backgrounds – they are ready for compositing. 17.5hrs @ 80%

3D Stuff:

Rendering completed for all animations. Some test renders are below. Final compositions will be completed in the coming days in Nuke.

Defend: http://vimeo.com/11221647

Attack: http://vimeo.com/11221599

Defeat: http://vimeo.com/11221603

Idle: http://vimeo.com/11221615

Time: 15 hours

Programming:

Defend implemented and working with HP from arrays: http://vimeo.com/11221114

Overview of code which will be helpful for people that will be coding in the near future: http://vimeo.com/11221378

Time: 4 hours

Total hours: 19 hours % completed based on assigned from last week: 95%

Next week will be spent making all the artwork for the glyphs to be printed on the cards. I will also be implementing the one button to rule them all system for the game. This will be a single button that will control Attack, Defend, Assign Position, and Assign Maneuver. This will be done to simplify the interface both on screen and on the physical game device. This is possible since no two events can occur at the same time ( ex. you can only defend if attacked, can only assign maneuver if maneuver card has been scanned, can only assign position if character card has been scanned in).

Rend-O-Rama one went well!

Ben- Finalizing scene for render, organizational steps for rendering, Tin Woodsman Rendering, Attack UI

Jason- Tripod re-animation, Tripod rendering, Maneuver programming. — 21 hours 90% of goal

Mike – Finalizing Book Animation/Integration, Finish King Arthur’s Attack, King Arthur Rendering

Hessam – Render preparations, tweaking animations, and fixing new issues. Working on the navigation of the site and image galleries. Hours 29.5 – 90% of the goals total. 80% for the 3D stuff and rendering, and 100% for the website.

Lauren – Edited scenes for render, created new shave hair setup, began rendering, finished card art and finalized UI screens.

Tracy – Preparations for rendering, rendered most of Graveyard Daemon (the rest should be complete and on campus waiting for me!) and rendered Time Shift.  The rest are still in the works.  Basic coding tweaks while I wait for final artwork for the in game menus.   Hours – 16.5 – 80% of my overall goal (100% of my programming goal since I didn’t set out to complete a lot this week and about 75% of my 3D goal due to long render times).

The team all-night rendering party was a huge success. It was nice to have a large chunk of time to work as a group and solve problems together. Rendering for Tripod entailed quite of a bit of re-animating and setup. Rendering completed thus far:

Tripod Idle Character Pass w/ reflections

Tripod Idle Shadow Pass

Tripod Idle Environment Pass

Tripod Defeat Character Pass w/ reflections

Tripod Defeat Shadow Pass

Tripod Defeat Environment Pass

Tripod Defend Character Pass w/ reflections

Tripod Defend Environment Pass

Hours on Tripod: 16

Programming has been completed for the maneuver assignments and tracking. As you can see in the video maneuvers are activated and assigned to cards in play and automatically applied if the maneuver matches a required maneuver card for the character before it is able to attack.

http://vimeo.com/11034423

Hours Spent Programming: 5

This week I believe I accomplished 90% of my goal with 21 hours.

Next week will consist of completing the final 2 Tripod renders and compositing them all. Programming will consist of getting HP to work on the cards as well as the player. Play box will officially be done Wednesday!! Just in time for the Lexiconquest weekly All Nighter Til The End party.

We have a lot planned in the coming weeks, highest on the list being finishing the project of course.

This Wednesday, the Biblionauts have scheduled an “ALL NIGHTER” (dun dun dun!) in which we hope to complete a large percentage of our rendering. Because most of our animation occurs over a relatively low number of frames, there’s shouldn’t be any issue completing most of what we need done. By being in one room over a set period, we will be able to ensure the most consistency in terms of lighting, camera angle, etc. And if any problems occur, there’s a large support group ready and willing to troubleshoot issues. Hopefully, when all is said and done early Thursday morning, we will have made amazing progress and will be able to move into paying attention into the next step of the project, namely the printing of the physical cards and the game programming.

But enough of that and onto what we did this week:

Mike: This week I worked on more of King Arthur’s animations and the Book for the intro animations.

Ben: Library Arena completion, Tin Woodsman attack and render passes, beginning of Billy Pilgrim animation

Jason: Defeat and arrival animations for Tripod. Attack button programming to check maneuver requirements. Hours:14  % complete vs. anticipated: 90%

Hessam: Attack animation, and working on the site (cleaning up the codes and add the accordion effect to Drupal) Hours: 18 hours % complete vs. anticipated: 80%

Lauren: Attack spell and animations, arrival animation, card render and finalizing interface. Hrs: 22.5, 90% of weekly goal complete.

Tracy: Main menu coding, reading PDFs into flash, card navigation, fixing Time Shift animation and editing Frankenstein’s Lightning animation. Hours: 17   % complete vs. anticipated: 88%

As promised, here are the tripod animations.

Arrive:

Hours spent: 2 hours

http://vimeo.com/10856993

Idle:

http://vimeo.com/10857113

Attack:

http://vimeo.com/10858007

Defend:

http://vimeo.com/10856986

Defeat:

Hours spent: 6 hours

http://vimeo.com/10856975

Total % completed vs. what was proposed for this week: 90%. I think I could have spent some more time on programming, but a lot of outside factors have inhibited this week.

As far as programming is concerned, there is added functionality for the Attack button. It now verifies that the correct maneuver cards have been activated for the character. Below are two videos showing this working. First shows when correct maneuver cards have not been activated for character and second shows when correct maneuver cards have been activated for character.

Hours programming: 6 hours

http://vimeo.com/10856630

http://vimeo.com/10856933

Next week, granting I am still in senior project, will consist of rendering everything for Tripod. Programming wise, defend and assign maneuver buttons will be implemented and working and maneuver cards will be scanned in as glyphs.