Week 4: Software & Electronics - Written by Vivek

This week the software group got a fair amount working this week. The hints system has fully thought out and implemented. All the hardware (like monitors and machines) are set up in their proper housing. We have figured out a solution for the hint system. And have that function and ready for the room. The cameras presented an issue, however. Though we thought we had the correct cameras it seems we made a mistake in purchasing the cameras. The cameras we originally purchased were not fully night vision functional. So, in response one of our group members paid for inferred cameras out of their own pocket and are supplying the room with the cameras for now. We believe it will be fully functional by 11/26/2019.

 The maze puzzle is also presenting some issues. After we added some chasing enemies. We decided it was best to not try to pour efforts into a pathfinding-based chaser enemy, seeing as pathfinding would be both hard to code as well as hard to avoid blind. So instead we came to the conclusion the enemies should be patrolling specific areas. This new version also has a password interface that leads into the game. However, the language can’t handle shift so as of now it is strictly limited to lowercase letters and numbers. We were also going to switch the way the game was presented on screen from a windowed version to a full screen application which would change the way how we would display the puzzle from being relative from the top left corner to the center of the screen instead. Another issue we ran into with our programming language is that the escape key is an instant kill switch. This brought up the idea of hotkeys for swapping windows or force quitting. As of now we have a functioning puzzle, however, inputting a key without ascii values (i.e. arrow keys) will crash the program. So, in its current state is operable, though prone to crashing. Of course, we could give the instructions for no hotkeys, shortcuts or specific keys to generally stay away from. In this event the software time is working on a more permanent solution by importing the project into unity and continue development on the project in there (was processing previously). Other notes for unity version are not having fully wasd-like controls but instead having the player always moving and just allow direction shift when they need it.

We are in a good place set-up wise. Everything hardware wise is functional and operational. Most of the software components are also operational and will be fully able to be set up soon. The only thing left for software is refining the game to processing into unity. Then of course any balancing issues the team might run into while play testing.