Aftershock Simulator Sprint 2

 The first thing I worked on this sprint was the person occupancy icon, a special UI element that fills up with color to indicate the proportion of people in a building out of its maximum capacity.

All the code for getting the icon to fill up had already been written, the challenge for this task was taking code written for the old deprecated UI system and re-implementing it into Vivian’s improved UI system. I really had to get into the weeds of understanding how Vivian’s UI system worked, but once I did, I was able to add a new sprite element to the UI pop-up, grab a reference to it, and add the code that gets it to display the right amount of color fill. 

This feature was possible to calculate because of my previous work from last sprint calculating how many people were in a building. Ultimately I’m really happy with how much success I had finding parity working within the UI system without having to change it much.

With the next task, however, the lack of a designer really started to impact our team. I was initially given a card to fix the search-and-rescue timer that displays the rescue progress over a building. After investigating it, however, I found out that everything was working as intended, it just wasn’t clear to the player how it was supposed to work—it was a design problem, not a code problem. 

The team threw out a couple suggestions for how to better indicate to the player what was happening, but since these ranged from changing the art assets to working with the AI system, it ended up being passed from person to person. Additionally, we discovered that many of these suggestions were impossible with the way the game’s codebase had been structured, so I eventually just decided to add a text popup to the progress bar to describe what’s happening

The major outcome of this was that we realized we would need a designer, especially with the direction the project was going—the majority of our backlog needed specialist interviews before we could implement them, and even still, they didn’t have specs. Fortunately, our professor decided to step up as the project’s designer, especially since he plans to continue it past our involvement in the project.

This also, however, led to a pivot of our priorities for the project. One of the first tasks I had after this meeting was coming up with some discussion questions so we’ll be ready for a specialist interview in the future. We discussed what we thought would be needed for the project to better focus on its learning objectives, and starting next sprint, we’ll probably start working on more of those major re-designs.

Which is why for my last task of the sprint, I thought it would be worthwhile to try fixing the day/night cycle. It did exist within the project, but was disabled since it wasn’t properly functional.

The first issue to fix was that it wasn’t connected to the game’s in-game clock. After reading through the code on how the various timer and clock functions work, I was able to add another module to the clock that calls the day/night cycle to update with time, passing the current time. From there, the day/night cycle uses a bunch of math to figure out how bright the sun should be and what angle it should be at. I wrote a function that turns the hour/minute time into minutes, divides it by the number of minutes in a day, converts it to radians so i can take the cosine of the function, and then invert that so that the sun gets brighter and brighter, hits its peak at mid-day, and then gets darker.

There’s a similar piece of code with the moon lighting to keep things not too-dark at night, although it probably needs some fine tuning. I went ahead and implemented it to be functional, then I plan to show it to my team, get some feedback, and make a few adjustments—since taking things out is way easier. In particular, I’m worried about the performance tanking due to the dynamic shadows, but because of the way it’s designed it’s super easy for me to disable them if they’re too costly.

This sprint had me doing a surprising amount of problem-solving, but now that it’s over I think the team is in a much better spot having a designated designer and with our collaborations on the plans for the direction of the project. Overall, I think I made some relevant quality-of-life improvements to the game’s UI and visual elements. Looking into the next sprint, we have a much better idea of what we’re trying to make, and I can look forward to being able to implement the changes we’ve decided on.

Aftershock Simulator Sprint 1

For this semester, I’ve been assigned to a special project making a training tool for the United States Geological Survey that models how earthquakes could affect San Francisco. A different team worked on the project for nine months and then passed the torch to our team to complete it.

Here’s what we’re starting with. This project is totally unlike anything I’ve ever had to work on before, and this first sprint was extremely challenging. The first hurdle we faced was having to do lots and lots of reading through scripting and documentation to understand how the project had been assembled. Especially since the old team suddenly and unexpectedly lost their funding halfway through development, one can imagine how organized a project is left under those conditions. Nevertheless, it’s a really impressive system they’ve set up.

One strategy I initially tried to employ when going through the game scripts to try to find what I was looking for was having my own note document where I could write summaries of the scripts, map connections between them, and mark which one’s I’d looked at and which ones I hadn’t yet. While this somewhat helped me understand the codebase, it was rather time inefficient.

The most important move I ended up making was that when I setup a new install of Unity and Visual studio to work from my laptop instead of my desktop, it came with an updated package that lets me click on an implementation of a class or struct in the code and find its definition and references. This was something I’d never had to think about before—since in all the projects I’d made before I never had an issue finding my definitions—but it was vital to working effectively in somebody else’s project.

Ultimately, learning to use this feature was the most important thing I learned, and after a lot of hard work, I managed to get my first assigned feature implemented! I modified the existing code to display a building’s details when clicked on to additionally show how many people are in the building. First, I needed to add a reference to the RuntimeNavigationNetwork which contains a dictionary called TileNodes that lets me input the clicked-on tile and output an AI node. Not shown in the image, but I also had to add the RuntimeNavigationNetwork as a library so that I could reference the TransportNode data class for the nodes. Then, I feed that to the AIMapData’s PeopleNumDic dictionary to find how many people are at the selected node. Finally, I return that back to the UI display, which displays the number of people in the building.

I’m somewhat disappointed in myself that this is all I have for tangible progress, but I hope that the description of the process shows just how much work went into it. The majority of the battle was trying to figure out where all this data was stored in the codebase, and then figuring out how to link up those wildly different systems.  and with this first step up the mountain, we’ve got some momentum going forwards.