12/1 Moral Coders Group Posting


What each individual in the group worked on over the last week

  • Caroline – I continued to work on the road and landscape for the week.  It was mostly complete until I encountered some error messages (described below) and I had to backtrack some.  I lost some of the landscaping to my terrain due to these issues with my assets folder so I will have to go back and re-add those this week.   
  • Frank – I spent time in the lab working with Galen on getting a test vehicle operational in Unity. I also spent time working through and learning about the process of creating prefabs by combining meshes, textures, colliders, audio files, and animations.
  • Galen – My job was to spend time improving or replacing old models as well as figuring out how to control our vehicles and switch between a view from the car to a third person view.
  • Tony – I continued on implementing HTC Vive with our project

A description of the accomplishments made

  • Caroline – I completed the road for the project and the basic layout of the terrain.  I was able to troubleshoot some of my problems, and am still working on some new ones I have encountered.
  • Frank – I was able to specifically identify solutions to obstacles that came up while experimenting with the Unity skycar asset based on the information that I’d studied
  • Galen – Updated the car model to be more “self driving car like”. Wrote a script to allow the easy creating of paths using unity objects for the car to follow so that it can be easily integrated into final scene. Added control to the speed and built in stop feature for the user.

A description of the problems encountered

  • Caroline – When working with Unity this week, I encountered error messages regarding my trees and “Bloom and Flare” scripts.  I tried to find solutions online but could not find anything of much help.  Since the error said it was having trouble locating the Bloom and Flare’s location I traced the Bloom and Flare script locations in my assets folder and deleted it and re-downloaded it.  This fixed the error messages but did something funky to my lighting and terrain so I am now attempting to fix this problem.  

unity-problems

  • Frank – Initially we had issues when placing the skycar, as it would respond to gravity once placed into the virtual environment during a running simulation, but then bounce off into the stratosphere. We determined that the source of this error, as well as a few visual hiccups with the skycar model, were do to a misapplication of the skycar prefab relative to its constituent components.
  • Galen – This week was generally productive. Had some trouble with collision detectors that we were able to figure out after a bit by using wheel colliders built into unity. Experimented with first person driving experience and found it a bit nauseating in a hilly environment.

Plans for the upcoming week

  • Caroline – This week I am going to finish fixing the terrain landscape.  Additionally I am going to choreograph/create the opening sequence to our project that is designed to introduce the user to the program and give them time to adjust to the environment and the equipment before they are forced to make their ethical decision.
  • Frank – This week I plan to review specifically whether Unity’s default assets will be sufficient as far as human assets go, as well as how to get them to behave in a virtual environment (i.e. not achieve orbit within seconds of spawning like the skycar).
  • Galen – I’ll be finishing the car in the next week and a half including the driving and possible first person views. Add views from the perspective of the victims.
  • Tony – Continue to work with Vive software as group members develop corresponding aspects in Unity.

At least one piece of media related to your work

option_shot

Oncoming decision for participant

scene_view

Sample of Scene