Date Range: 02/15-26/2019
Total Hours Spent: 4
Overview
My last update was before our Alpha presentation on the 15th, which seemed to be received quite positively, which gave our moral a boost as we looked forward optimistically towards our reading week. Not to say we've lost our optimism, but, this past sprint has probably been the least productive yet; our time has been spread extremely thin between studying for midterms and finishing other assignments with imminent deadlines. Our team was able to make some minor contributions to a couple areas between UX details and development frameworks but we'll be re-visiting our sprint plan this week to see how we can still achieve our goals despite our current work load.
Challenges & Successes
The limited time I was able to lend to the project was spent on getting the base-level collisions necessary for user-object interaction to fire and register custom events. As I've mentioned in the past, I'm inexperienced with writing code in JavaScript - I had my humble beginnings with programming in C++ - which has made the process more time consuming than I would have liked. I previous assignment in this same class helped me understand the concept of parenting/unparenting objects with others but the functionality I'm integrating for Kendo Gakko is a little more involved. My main hurdle to overcome right now is figuring out how to handle the events I need for recognizing a collisions between the user's hand and their sword as well as recognizing when the user is actively "grabbing". I've been able to fire and recognize events for both touching and grabbing independently but have yet to figure out how to handle the order of those events to make sure picking-up-and-dropping works as a user would expect, ideally you would have to touch something and then grab it in order to pick it up.
A hit box was added to the palm of the user's right hand which will be used to detect collisions between it and other objects in the virtual space; the plan is to be able to detect when the user is touching the sword and "pick it up" when it is grabbed.
I've talked briefly with our instructor who suggested that I create an "event handler" object within the A-Frame scene that will listen for and manage the events I'm interested in so this will most likely be my course of action as I move forward with this feature.
Next Steps
Over the next few days our team will be re-calibrating our sprint plans to accommodate our current work load from other courses so we can continue to make some measurable progress. With our Beta presentation coming up in 2 and a half weeks, there's a lot for us to get done in the midst of new "term projects" now starting up for each of our courses on top of other weekly assignment deadlines.
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