Hunter Hale

Science:

Devised methods to better represent trees and sky into the FI3RST environment.

Examined data from study and encouraged more study recruitment.

Engineering:

Cleared several bugs and issues from the AgentShop

Implemented sky and tree drawing code for FI3RST.  Worked on object placement.  Generated lots of textures.

Wrote sky shader.

 Engineering:

Worked extensively in FI3RST during the past week.  Implemented a custom high quality lighting model and bump mapping.  Got my hands around the automatic shader code generation system in use in python and figured out how to access all of the passed in parameters.  The currently lighting model supports 7 lights(all we were using) of point type, as well as an 8th ambient light.  Specular and diffuse are currently caluclated on a per pixel value with constant, linear, expoential light attentuaition with distance from the light source.  Lighting color can also be defined.  All the controls for the lighting shader are contained inside the Lighting.py class and ligthing is defined globally for all nodes on the scene graph.   Bump mapping is implemed using the simple technique of peterbing the interpolated normal at each fragment location based on a normal pulled from a texture map.  Currently texture maps for normals must be passed in as .jpg’s as that the panda shader binder is kinda dumb and only looks for that type of file,  this is sub optimal as .jpg is a lossy format.

I also performed extensive renevations on the behavior shop currently it supports custom controls to define paramaters to triggers and behaviors in a much more universal manor.  Eventually these controls will be created on the fly based on paramaters passed in from behave engine and FI3RST and the frame work is in place to do this but for the moment they are hard coded.

I am continuing to polish and improve the user experience in agent shop and bring the user logging up to a functional level, but it is tentatively ready to go.

Also I discovered through beating my head against a wall that wxPython does not like to dynamically create new tools on the fly via method calls.  Apparently there is some form of finalization after the constructor and _init_ctrls conclude which prevents the addition of new controls to a screen.

Science:

Looked through the study results found that most people used verbage compatable with ours.  We might want to look at action specific verbage to correspond to certain actions in the future.  For example instead of placing the bomb most people wanted to “plant” the bomb.  For events like that we might want to provide a little more custimization than the generic “place object – type : bomb”

Engineering

Deciphered the Event model in panda 3D. – Tasks can be created for the task manager to run a method every frame.

Figured out the Matrix Space model in Panda – It has a very complex but powerful auto matrix generate that it exposes to the shaders – called using the format [trans, tpose]_[world,view, model,project]_to_[world,view,model,project]

Figured out how the bind shader symantics in panda very simple method that does pretty much everything for you even easier than XNA

Implemented custom silouqete edge detector via shaders since it is good spring board into lighting and bump maping and is really easy to tell when something is not correct.(see pictures)

Science

Read a great article on how the squad AI works in Company of Heroes in Game AI wisdom 4. As well as several articles on rebuilding damaged navigation meshes.

To Do:

Implement lighting and relief mapping in panda3d via a shader.

Clean up interface in preperation for human trials.