COMP 310 Fall 2011	Lec38: Final Project Milestone 1 prep

Today we will concentrate on issues that arose during students' Milestone 1 work over the weekend and we willl nail down what common interfaces and for the Milestone 1 deliverables for the next class period.

• All provided code now available, including new IGameConnection and IJoinChatRoom interfaces and World Wind Java libraries
  • Carefully follow the directions for installing the WWJ libraries, especially if you are running a 32-bit system!
  • See Lec 40 for more info and how to get the WWJ demo.
• API issue:  Should the response to IUnknownData_XmitStatus AWAYS be either an IAddCommand packet or IFail_XmitStatus?
  • See forum discussion.
• Milestone 1 requirements
  • The previously implicit requirement of a description of how your game will work was explicitly added to the Milestone 1 requirements.
  • What is the minimum required funcitonality for Milestone 1?

Milestone 1 Advice

• Think simple!   Don't make your game too complicated.
• In terms of features, think in terms of priority and expandability:
  • What are the base, "mission-critical" features that are absolutely needed in order to play your game?   These are the highest priority features.
  • What features fall into the "if we could add this too, it would be really cool" category?   These are lower priority features.
  • Architect your system so that adding additional features will require a minimum of code modification.
• Don't try to write the whole project at once!
  • Write small pieces at a time, testing each piece to make sure it works BEFORE writing more pieces.
    • Write stub (dummy) code for non-yet-developed pieces that have simple, hard-wired behaviors -- this allows you to test other pieces of the system first and minimizes the pain of trying to debug the full system which has a million places and ways of going wrong.
  • Don't be afraid to write something, "just to test out the idea", even if you know you will eventually throw that code away -- you will have learned valuable insight and experience, so the effort is well worth the time.  
• START EARLY!!
• ASK FOR HELP WHEN YOU HAVE PROBLEMS!!

© 2011 by Stephen Wong and Scott Rixner