This last week felt like a lot of thrashing on design up until Wednesday evening. The issue was figuring out how to lay out boxes, or our code element representations, in world space. We started with a naive solution, static coordinate offsets, but it felt clunky. The alternative to this was physics-based spatial modeling. Spent a lot of time on this.

When we started the thinking was that c++ would be much more efficient than Unreal’s Blueprint system. Since we started off with physics modeling as an experimental solution Mickey used blueprints to play around with it. It turns out that blueprints are pretty damn cool! Fast to work with, good performance (almost native c++), simple to understand. This bodes well for the spirit of our project.

We reenabled VR for the project and started testing with it… which immediately demonstrated how ridiculously large the boxes were to start with. Mickey shrank them and tore up the existing design at the end of the week.

Next week:

• Ken is going to figure out box/motion controller manipulation
• Mickey is going to rebuild the design around a smaller frame of reference