Astronomical Bodies Gave Me a Headache

This was a tough week. I overcommitted. Let me explain. So, this past week I started back at work at Walmart Neighborhood Market and took on three days of work (~21 hrs. before breaks are taken out) as well as trying to do everything in Disco Tray Studios. I was a little overwhelmed and had to take time for myself. However, I told them to lower me down to just 2 days max to avoid this in the future. Things should be much better this week.

What I worked on this week

Now onto business, the week before last we had our meetings about the games, so last week we were able to start on them. The focus that I appointed to myself was Astronomical Bodies, and I’ll be honest, it is hard to understand. I don’t think it is that fault of the programmers for the most part, I just don’t fully know how it all works. I put many hours into trying to understand it and messing with the code to see if I could create the changes I wanted. My goals this week were to:

• Understand the code
• Insert comments in the Code to demonstrate understanding & help others understand
• Tweak the Camera Centering Algorithm
• Adjust the planet’s size to mass correlation
• Add a counter to count the bodies in the system
• Attempt to Optimize the games

I tried my best to understand the code and add comments to it. I thought all was going well. Looking at it, I saw numbers that could be changed to affect the time jumps, the planet size to mass correlation, it looked like most of the variables I needed. After a while of messing around with the numbers it became apparent that I didn’t understand the code well enough, so I went back to it for a while. I got the Camera Centering Algorithm in a pretty good place and made a more obvious planet size to mass correlation. I also added a counter of bodies to the code. It only said the amount in the console, but that’s all we need for now. However, I couldn’t figure out how to mess with the time or optimize it at all. On top of that, I was trying to figure out how to remove the black color option for planets; it was annoying to have the planets keep blending in with the background. I tried 3 different ways to resolve this issue and nothing worked. Eventually I just gave up on this game. I need someone else to take a look at this.

After I decided to stop working on Astronomical Bodies for bit, I decided to look at @itsmaya. I combed through some of the GameManager code and then got straight to work. I began making comments and even wrote some of the new logic that we will be implementing. I commented ideas we could do in the near future of this game and found out how to write 2D arrays in C#. I felt like I was much more where I belonged when writing comments and code for this game.

This week I plan to talk with Ian about Astronomical Bodies, maybe scheduling time to work on it together, and making further progress on both games. Also, if Ian needs help in ChemSim then I will do what I can to help.