COMP 310
Fall 2012
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Lec38: Final Project
Milestone 1 prep
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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
- Carefully follow the directions for installing the WWJ libraries.
- You may need to use the svn:ignore setting especially if you are running a 32-bit system
or have a different operating system from your partner!
- A WWJ demo app is available: simply check out the following project:
https://svn.rice.edu/r/comp310/course/WWJ_Demo
- There is a problem WWJ with Macs running OS 10.8 (10.7 too
perhaps)
- The unreleased WWJ v2.0 seems to work, but it breaks the demo
code, which may mean changes to the supplied "map" package.
- There are a couple of unresolved API questions: 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.
- Think variant and invariant:
Implement the invariants first and then add the variants!
- 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!!
© 2012 by Stephen Wong