Situation:
- There is an issue in the telemetry tool that doesn't allow for proper score tracking
- Spline roads need to be implemented.
Task:
- Fix bug in telemetry tool.
- Work on the construction of straight roads along a spline first, then implement intersection interaction.
Action:
- I had a look at the tool with Mathijs on his computer and got it to work properly.
- I first added a system that would go through all the road tiles in the scene and determine whether they are a straight road or an intersection. An intersection road tile is a road tile with 3 or more adjacent road tiles. Once I collected all the straight road tiles within one straight road section (by checking the neighbours of the initial tile found, similar to how we calculate the range of necessities), I made sure to order them correctly from one end of the road to the other so I could then draw a line (or spline) through these tiles. Once this was added I had to make sure the tangents would point in the right direction (tangents control the curve of the line or spline at each spline point and would cause weird squiggles if not done properly). Lastly, I could add a placeholder mesh that would be placed and curved along the spline to create the road. Intersections weren't added this week yet unfortunately.
Result:
- The score tracking works now on Mathijs' pc, but hasn't been tested on other systems.
- The straight roads are constructed well, but still need to connect themselves to the intersection road tiles. There seems to be no noticeable reductions in performance.
Reflection:
- As this was something that had to be done quickly, I wasn't able to check if the fix worked for other pcs. The score count on screen also didn't show any score which makes me think it might be an issue with the git repository not sending the right changes to my pc. This will have to be checked later.
- This took longer than expected. I have worked with splines before in Unreal, but this was quite a while ago and I had to thus relearn some things. As things aren't hard-coded (hard-coded means that data, such as coordinates, is entered directly in the code by the programmer instead of letting it be calculated or generated by the program), it is hard to tell immediately if any bugs would show up. We have also decided as a team that it might not be the best use of our time to focus on performance as it is a proof of concept and we want to get as much of our idea worked out as possible.
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