Lessons Learned - Post Asteroids 3D

Lessons Learned - Post Asteroids 3D

Brett208 25 Oct 2015 16:20

I had a great time working with everyone on the project. A few big learning points for me are below. I learn a lot by coding with other people, which I do not get the opportunity to do often being a hobbyist.

Sweet screenshot from game below

The importance of a diff tool with version control.
I had my first big merge conflict when RB and I both implemented the IPlayer interface and Player1 class differently. I need to spend time really learning about the diff tool and what the different colors mean and options are for deconflicting merges. I always want to clear the merge conflict quickly to keep working, but the less time I spend resolving, the worse problems I create in my code base.

Referencing the Task Manager often and writing concise tasks (Trello in our case)
Near the end of the event, I wrote a task something along the lines of "Hook my collision code into RB's new events". This is very vague and not useful. What I meant to write was 3 separate tasks:

1. Reduce a player's lives by one whenever their ship collides with an asteroid.
2. Add an explosion sound whenever a player collides with an asteroid.
3. Add points to a player when an asteroid is destroyed by one of their bullets.

If I had assigned these three concise tasks to myself in Trello as opposed to the vague one I wrote, it would have been clear what I was working on. Perhaps RB would have recognized I was working in the Player class and maybe not jumped in there without seeing where I was at. This would have prevented the aforementioned code conflict from ever occurring.

Couple of other cool things I learned

• UV Mapping XNA requires a UV Map to apply a texture to a model through the content pipeline. I now know how to add one to a model now in Blender.
• 3D collision Detection I learned 3D collision detection using spheres.
• Default values for get only properties How to set the value of a get only property in C# 5.0 by marking the set property as private and setting in the constructor. like:

public Player1
{
    public int Lives { get; private set; }
 
    public Player1()
    {
        Lives = 3;
    }
}

Thanks for everyone who came out and worked on Asteroids3D. Hopefully I'll be around for the next collaboration.

Starfield tutorial i referenced to make the background: http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/starfield-tutorial.
Asteroid tutorial I referenced to make the asteroid: http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/how-to-make-a-realistic-asteroid/.
Textures I pulled for the asteroid and bullet came from: http://www.textures.com/.

Last edited on 25 Oct 2015 17:42 by Brett208 Show more

Re: Lessons Learned - Post Asteroids 3D

Marcus42 25 Oct 2015 18:11

Hey, I didn't realize that you made both the background and the asteroids! Nice job! (BlenderGuru really is great for that kind of thing, isn't it? The only thing I've tried learning from that site and can't seem to get figured out is compositing, but oh well.)

These collaborations always seem to be a great learning opportunity, that's for sure. I plan to go through the code very thoroughly to figure out some of the 3D stuff, and I just learned how to set a default value to a get only variable from you describing how you learned it, so thanks, haha! Trello was also really neat. I'll probably use it for myself when the next competition rolls around.