Project+Progress

FOSS Project Brainstorming  Because of our teams interest in working on a project that is not only beneficial to education, but also to children, we have narrowed our FOSS project choices down to the following three initiatives:

**Sugar Labs **
 (top choice) Sugar is free and open source software that is part of the worldwide effort to provide all children with an equal opportunity for quality education. Sugar was originally developed for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), which is another project we are interested in working on. It is now openly available and works on most computers.

**One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) **
 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a project that is similar to Sugar in that it not only uses Sugar, but also is interested in the effort to ensure that all children are able to receive quality education. This initiative achieves this by providing basic, low-budget laptops to less fortunate children all over the world. These laptops include applications and activities to encourage children to learn, share and collaborate amongst each other and the world.

**OO4Kids ("OpenOffice for Kids")**
 OO4Kids, or "OpenOffice for Kids", is another educational tool. Unlike OLPC and Sugar, however, OO4Kids is a work in progress and has not been used by any outside users yet. It is based off the source code OpenOffice but is much more simplified. The idea behind the project is to make OpenOffice simple enough for children 7-12 years old to be able to use with ease.

Final Decision It's official! 4's Company has now decided on a project to work on for the semester. As you can see from above, our top choice was Sugar Labs. Lucky for us, we were able to get it! Even though we only had to have our top choice, we have already found the project we would like to work on. One of the projects Sugar Labs is working on is called Math4. We are currently in the process of doing more in depth research on Math4 as well as joining the mailing lists and IRC channels to learn more about how we can help...more to come soon!

"Getting the Code" Experience Report Due to some illness, Four's Company has not been able to meet as a full team to write up a collective experience report on checking out the code. Each of us, however, worked on getting the code onto our own machines. We will have a collective report up shortly, but in the meantime please check out our individual blogs from the contact page to get information on some personal experiences.

We have all been able to get the source code for our project. Since we were not able to meet for this deliverable, we have managed to get the source in different ways. Jaime used the Ubuntu Terminal, Brittany was able to get the code on her Mac OSX using the same commands as Jaime. Staci and Ryan used the GIT repository to download the source from a ".tar" file. Now that we have the source however, we need to build our project. We tried using Netbeans with the Python plugin to build the project, but we have been unsuccessful thus far. I think that once we get together we will be able to figure out how to build our project. We have fallen behind, but I think that we will be able to catch up soon. After we build our project, our next step will be to find a bug that we plan to fix.

In recent news, we just found out how to build/run the code in terminal. The problem we are having now is that we may be missing some essential code. When we went to run the code in terminal (python mafhactivity.py), we got the following error:

Using forutune engine from path Traceback (most recent call last): File "mafhactivity.py", line 11, in from fortuneengine.GameEngine import GameEngine ImportError: No module named fortuneengine.GameEngine

After some further investigation, we realized one of the folders in our development folder called fortuneengine was completely empty. This may be the source of our problem, but we are hitting the mailing list/wiki to see what we can find....stay tuned...

Solution found! In order to get the files in the fortuneengine folder and build/run Fortune Hunter, go into the mainline/ folder in terminal and run <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">git submodule update --init <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">. To run the game, go into the MAFH2 folder and run <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">python mafhactivity.py <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">. It should work after this :).

<span style="color: #800000; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 210%;">Progress Update 03/29/11 It's been a while, so we would like to update everyone on where we are and where we see everything going from here (now that things are slowing down concerning POSSCON and everything). To start, we are excited that Ryan has been able to get something done on our checklist. His main assignment was to figure out how to fix the transparency issue with the enemies (the black lines were transparent). The black lines are now black and seem to be staying that way :).

Everything else is going pretty smoothly with all things considered. I (Brittany) have been working on documenting the code and getting what we're doing out there by keeping the wiki updated and posting to the mailing lists. So far, posting to the mailing lists has been successful and quite helpful. People are friendly and responsive and willing to help, which is exactly what we need right now. There is a lot of documentation to be done so I'm slightly skeptical as to whether I'll be able to fully document the activity by the end of the semester. One suggestion (made by Dr. B) that I'm going to look into is to create a Wiki page especially for developers of Fortune Hunter as a form of documentation. This is something I'll have to do some research on, but it may be a solution to the problems I'm having. I have also been able to enlist the help of one of the contributors to Fortune Hunter (JLew) to hopefully make even more progress.

Jaime and Staci are moving forward with their projects as well, with some minor speed bumps. One problem that seems to be affecting both of their progress is the issue of working with the newer version versus the older version. There are map files for each dungeon, but we can't quite figure out what to do with those either (especially since when we open them, it's a bunch of letters and numbers). We are waiting to hear back from the mailing lists/emails we have sent to get some help. Until we do, we will continue to work as diligently as we can.

<span style="color: #800000; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 31px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Progress Update 03/31/11 There is not much more to report for today...One big breakthrough we have had is that Jaime was able to finally get to dungeon 3 (which we've been trying to figure out for a while)! This means that the original plan is in effect (to see our current assignments and plans for contributing, please check out our Timeline page.) You can also check out the Testing FH page to see how to do things such as modifying screen resolution in Ubuntu, instant kills for testing purposes, and other things.

Ryan is in the process of working on graphics to make the game more interesting/exciting. For example, when you attack and kill an enemy, the enemy just stands there and then disappears when its dead, which is not very interesting. Ryan is going to try and add some graphics to makes the battles more interesting/fun such as actual fire when the players choose the 'fire' attack or some kind of effect when the player is healed.

As for documentation, I am in the process of communicating with a former programmer for Fortune Hunter named Justin Lewis (JLew for short) who is helping me to figure out the best method to use to get as much documentation done as possible. Also, as we're finding things in the game that need to be documented, the team lets me know and I make a note to document it, whether it be in the code or something I need to post to the wiki. For example, when you look at the map (if you can get it to show up on your screen) you can see it's color coded but there's no key/legend for it. One possibility is to actually make and include a key next to the map. Another solution would be to document what each color stands for. Right now, I'm trying to see if it's best to add on to the Fortune Hunter wiki from RIT or to just start our own CofC Fortune Hunter wiki.

Staci is working with Jaime to figure the game out better so that they can get their tasks done more efficiently. If you have been keeping up, you know that Staci is assigned to work on the victory/defeat screens. What we can't figure out is whether this means a victory/defeat screen for the whole game or for each battle or maybe even both. Our best bet at the moment is to look at victories/defeats in battle and then as we work our way through the game we can add them and possibly even be able to get one for the end of the game.

Something else we discussed is the fact that when the player is injured or healed, there is nothing displayed that alerts the player of either happening (minus the HP gauge, which moves as it should, but if you don't know to look for it, you won't). Whether this is something we will actually try to tackle or not we haven't decided, but it is definitely an option if anyone gets done early or some free time :).

<span style="color: #800000; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 210%; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Progress Update 04/05/11 We are finally getting into the real swing of things with this project. One exciting piece of news before we get into individual updates is that we got a request from a 'Blitzkev' to become a member of the wiki (the note he attached to the request was that he was the Original Fortune Hunter Programmer. This is excited news for all of us. If we are able to get him involved with us for the rest of the semester, we should be able to get some more of these tasks done a little quicker. We have messaged him and are waiting to hear back.

Onto more specific updates...Jaime has made some extreme progress in getting through the game and figuring out the code. She has been able to fix and find a few errors in the code, as well as helping others to better understand the code and running it in Ubuntu. She has also been doing a lot of playtesting, which is another task on the FH active ticket list (in a way we've all contributed to this task while working on our individual assignments).

Ryan has been working on graphics and finding ways to incorporate more interesting and interactive graphics into the game. One thing that he was working on when we met last was getting the sprites to disappear/be replaced by a pile of bones once they die. He was able to get the sprite's image to be replaced with another, but once he tried to place an image of a pile of bones in that slot and it would no longer work. Besides fixing that, he's also still working on the graphics for the different player attacks (fire, lightening, etc.)

Staci is diligently working on a victory/defeat screen for when you win or lose a battle/dungeon/the game. So far, she has been able to display something on the handheld device and the bottom of the screen when a battle has been won a battle with an enemy. There have also been a few problems surrounding the heal button (damage dealt, no notification of being healed, etc.). This is something else that she has been and will continue to look at.

As for myself, I have been working to keep up on documentation and posting to the mailing lists and wikis. I did help to solve one of the unassigned tasks that are on our list however. The 'special' button on the battle menu has never done anything when any of us clicked it. As I went through the code to do documentation, I found a class called Items.py that contains the code for all the weapons, gadgets, etc. used in the game. Everything was sorted, and there was a category called special. In this category there was one item listed (a calculator). Being that none of us have run across a calculator to pick up, we are assuming that this is why the special button doesn't work in battle (because we don't have any special items in our inventory). If you check out our @Timeline you can see what I've accomplished documentation wise and what is to come.

<span style="color: #800000; font-family: Impact,Charcoal,sans-serif; font-size: 210%; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Progress Update 04/12/11 This will be a short update for now...

The first thing I was to reiterate is that our abstracts are due this week for the Poster Session. Being that I somewhat know what abstracts consist of and what information they should convey, I created a draft of our abstract for our team to look at (being in charge of outreach, I take this project as a personal task more so than for the group). We haven't made a final decision on how we want to organize our poster (and it really shouldn't take too long to make once we do) so I started working on our Prezi for our final presentation. I've never personally made a prezi before, so this is a learning process for me as well as a part of my job as "person in charge of documentation and outreach" :) . Also, I believe if we can get a framework for our final presentation the poster will come even easier, because we will be able to use the same basic ideas but scale them down a little to be more "poster-esque". As far as documentation, I haven't had to opportunity to do a lot of work on it. I've been working on the above as well as things going on in other classes. The good news is, however, that it will be still quite feasible for me to get the critical documentation done (after talking to Justin Lewis, he has informed me of the classes that are most important and really need documentation) and create a great final prezi.

Our team hasn't met collectively in about a week, so I can't report on my teammates progress at the moment but if they see this I'm sure they'll add their tidbits (or if not we'll add them in class today).