Author: vaishnavi yathirajam

This being a week before our final presentation, we made sure to finalize everything in our prototype in the beginning itself to get feedback from our advisors before handing over the project and documentation to our clients.

Other than that, we worked on the following this week:

• Creating a new build
• Updating website
• Promotional video
• Demo Video
• Post mortem report of our game
• Final Presentation
• Archive
• Client Handbook
• Polishing
• Project Hand off

CREATING A NEW BUILD:

For the new build, we focused on the following things:

• minor bug fixes
• client requirement

SHOWCASE: Our showcase went really well and everyone were really impressed by our project. One of the major feedbacks we got from the showcase was to polish the pedestrians in the environment.

CLIENT REQUIREMENTS:

• Customization tutorial: Our clients had requested for  a one on one session on how to customize few changes in our prototype. One of the programmers gave a brief tutorial to both the clients on how we implemented the features in our prototype.
• Documentation: We documented all the important points in our build.

NEW BUILD:

We fixed the behavior of pedestrians and traffic in the new build.

DEMO AND PROMOTIONAL VIDEOS:

We created a demo video from our final build to present it in our final presentation and also worked on the promotional video which has all the team member talking about their experience and role in the project building process. We also had the clients talk about their expectations, involvement and feedback as well.

Client Handbook:

We came up with a client’s handbook including all the details on how the project works. In our clients handbook we made sure to include every aspect of documentation (programming, UI/UX design, research, 3D art), User’s instruction manual (which explains our control scheme), user testing analysis.

POST MORTEM REPORT OF OUR PROJECT:

We worked on the post mortem report of our project wherein we included all the detailed explanation on our work flow from pre planning-research-project design-development-feedback-playtesting-revised iterations-project handoff.

FINAL PRESENTATION: 

Our final presentation included all the points that our director asked us to and also a demo of our game.

ARCHIVE, WEBSITE:

We moved all our work draft, final products to the archive and also made sure that the website is up to date

PROJECT HAND OVER: 

We handed over the working executable files and project files to RCI on 12/10/2017 and City of Pittsburgh clients on 12/12/2017. As a backup we are installing it on our instructor’s computer as well.

The week started by softs opening.

Softs Opening:

We got mostly positive feedback but were advised to talk only on what was required to.

Some of the feedback we got during softs:

-Give a Clear feedback when something in the environment is selected

-Sounds (The birds sounds are disturbing)

-There is bug when changing a building to park for the first time

 

-Thunder sound plays when exciting a menu

-Autonomous road option

We came up with a schedule after the softs opening:

We will be working on the following things for the next part of the week other than the documentation.

Programming

-Import all the buildings

-Autonomous road option

-Pedestrian/traffic change

-Add texture/prefab for the parking lots

UI Functionality

-Implement screenshot function to the interface

-Show thumb position on the left controller

-Add tutorial

-Highlights are not very obvious in the color coded view

Bugs:

-Commercial Hi is not yet functional

-Reset is not functional on floors

-Placement of the buildings issue (scale)

-There is bug when changing a building to park for the first time

-Thunder sound plays when exciting a menu

For the Documentation:

We are documenting all the parts of the project and also working on the instructors manual for the users.

 

This week was the thanksgiving break for the most part of it. But during the initial two days, we worked on the feedback we got from the play testing session of the previous week.

-We fixed the bugs that we saw during the previous week

-We came up with a new iteration of UI

This iteration divide the menu options on both the controllers

-We finished making all the models and imported them all into the scene

-We got the screenshot function working and attached to the UI

 

This week we had two major events:

-Meeting and play testing with the MUD (Master of Urban Designing) students

-Faculty playtesting

MUD students play testing session:

We had 12 MUD students from RCI, CMU visit our project room. They had a lot of input on our product and gave us some valuable information.

They spoke about how they see this product being extremely useful for urban designers.

How we could improve the product for better and what details do the urban designers look for in the site of work in general.

Things in our product they see as very useful components:

-Shadows transitioning depending on the time and height of the buildings

-Buildings size variation

-Reaction of the environment when they make a change to the building

The things that they feel can be added to the product which are very useful for the urban designers:

-Ability for the users to control the minute details in the environment like the trash cans, mail box.

-Placement of objects in the environment

-Positioning of the sidewalks and curbs

In conclusion, they said that the product would be a great tool for urban designers once developed more.

ETC Faculty Playtesting:

We wanted to play test with our faculty members before the softs. So our schedule was to finish play testing in week 12, use week 13 to make the changes and be ready for softs by week 14.

Feedback from the faculty:

Though positive, there were minute things on which we were asked to concentrate on. There were some small bugs in the product which we noted down to work on.

Some of the feedback were:

-sounds should be improved in the environment

-UI design feels like left hand dominated

-The UI is confusing when there is transition between both the hands

We spent the week very productively and we wanted to work on the feedback during the thanksgiving week.

This week our major goal was to finish all the work we have in our schedule.

The major updates for the week will be:

-We will finish the Bird’s Eye View, Teleportation points, Color coded view, Screenshot option for the user

Below are the picyures of the Bird Eye View and the Teleportation points in our project

-We also did a couple of iterations with the UI and selected one design for our final UI design

-We also came up with our final color sheet

Below is the wireframe we came up with the final  UI Design:

 

The major events this week were:

-Final schedule of the project

-Playtesting session

Final Project Schedule:

After halves, we got our feedback from our instructors and the process grades. Depending on the feedback we came up with the final schedule for Programming, Art and UI/UX.

Our plan is to finish all the functionality except for the changes in terms of pedestrians and traffic.

For the programming,

We will be finishing all the feautures and functionality before the softs opening.

For the UI/UX, our plan is to finish everything by week 11

For the Art, we will finish all the low poly models (85 buildings) by thanksgiving and focus on the landmark after thanksgiving break.

Playtesting session:

We conducted a playtesting session  with the help of our faculty Mike. We had invited many people in our target demographic and created a survey and feedback questionnaire for them to answer.

Below are the few pictures from our playtesting session:

Playtesting Session feedback:

The major feedback we got was for our UI Design. Though most of them appreciated what we have for our interface, they gave some useful suggestions on how we could better our interface functionality.

Here is the list of changes we will implement for our final UI:

-We will be adding a back button which take sthe user to the main menu directly

-We will decrease the number of sub menus

-We will be adding levels in the building usage type (for an example, for a commercial building, we will have High commercial (grocery), medium commercial (restaurant), low commercial (spa)

 

The major events this week are the:

Halves presentation

Main client looking at our prototype for the first time

Playtesting session

Halves presentation:

In our halves presentation we spoke about the research, exploration, production, playtesting, demovideo and schedule

In our research, we spoke on our site visit, the books we referred to, the sites and the previous work we looked into. Then we spoke on how we moved to the production phase from our research phase after scoping down our project with the help of the proposal we gave our clients.

We divided our project presentation into 2 phases:

1phase- exploration

2phase- iteration

In exploration, we spoke on all the programming, art, data exploration process and in iterations, we spoke on how we worked on different iterations of UI, prototype and art style.

We also spoke about our demo video and all the features-functionality, art style, environment.

Main Client from the City of Pittsburgh, planning department had come down for our halves presentation and gave us some extremely good feedback later on.

Feedback on our halves presentation:

From instructors:

-They appreciated the progress we made since quarters

-They think we dressed well, handled questions well and the demo video was appreciated

From clients:

-They really are impressed by the work and the progress that we are making

Here is a photo from our halves presentation:

Playtesting session:

We conducted a playtesting session by asking people to sign up for it. Then we came up with scenes/tasks (user case stories) for them to do while in the prototype.

You are an urban design student tasked with changing the height of a local business from its current height to 10 stories. After you’ve adjusted the height, you want to see how the building’s shadow affects the area at dawn.

You are an urban design student tasked with previewing what Centre Avenue would look like with bike lanes. After you’ve made adjustments to the road, you’d like to see how the area looks in the rain.

You are an urban design student tasked with changing the height of a local house from its current height to four stories. After you’ve adjusted the height, you want to see how the building’s shadow affects the area at sunset.

You are an urban design student tasked with previewing what Centre Avenue would look like with bike lanes. After you’ve made adjustments to the road, you’d like to see how busy the roads are in the afternoon.

You are an urban design student tasked with changing the height of a local business from its current height to 10 stories. After you’ve made adjustments to the business, you’d like to see how busy the roads are in the afternoon.
Then we also had a questionnaire after they completed their tasks.

In the questionnaire we had asked their opinion and also asked them to rate our UI and prototype on scale of 5. The least rating we got was 4/5.

We also came up with a playtesting schedule:

Week 9 Thursday, October 26th

• Playtest Interface
  • How easy it is to navigate menus
    • Scale of 1-5 how intuitive is the menu, how it looks
  • Ease of selecting buildings
    • Could you tell when you selected the building, did you select the building you wanted,
  • Guest response to sound effects
• Immersiveness of space
  • Proper scale
  • Response to people walking along streets
• Tutorial paper playtest

Week 10 Wednesday, November 1st

• Interface
  • Guest response to adjusting building height
    • Response to visual effects and sound effects
  • Test 3D icons of road types
• Playtest first iteration of birds eye view mode
  • Are they close enough to buildings to make selections?
  • Can they move around and view the whole area?
  • Are the teleportation locations easy to select and understand?
• Teleportation-moving around an intersection
  • Is there any motion sickness?
  • Does the guest understand that they’ve moved to another area?
  • After they’ve teleported do they feel like they are correctly oriented in the space?

Week 12 Wednesday, November 15th

• Playtest changes from last playtest
• Zoning Features
  • How easy is it to change zoning types?
  • Are color codes easy to identify?

Below is the video of our main client (Ray Gastil, Director of City of Pittsburgh, Planning Department) Playtesting our product

 

The major part of this week was spent on preparations for our halves scheduled next week.

We had made the lists of things that we need to finish by halves and we spent the week by finishing all the things and polishing the stuff we had to.

We made our presentation for halves depending on the following criteria:

-The feedback we got from our quarters presentation and on what did we work through halves to address those feedbacks

-the platesting sessions with our target demographic

-reasearch and the work we had done

For the prototype,

Road type change:

We had worked in polishing the feature of road type change. Initially we had a place holder yellow in color to select a section of road and change it to another type. But we worked on automatically being able to select the section of the road and the sidewalk and will be able to change its type.

UI modifiacation:

We have been working on iterations on the UI. We had a couple of informal playtests with the ETC faculty and we had changed the UI depending on the feedback they had given us.

Other than that, we also worked on the tutorial which gives an idea to the naive users on how to use the controller.

The above three tutorial screens show the users how to select options from our menu and how to make those options fuction accordingly.

Important Events/Changes this week:

-The artstyle

-Finalization of timeline and schedule for the project

-Finalization of the things to do for Halves

ArtStyle:

Taking into consideration that our clients want us to build wider area range into our prototype, we had to come up witha  different artstyle. In the current artstyle, we are using maya and it has extremely high details on it.

The new artstyle is by using the photographs of the buildings as texture. This has an advantage of finishing the building in relatively faster time.

Here is the example of the buildings made using the photographic texture method:

The week was spent on finalizing the halves requirements.

We came up with a list on what all we should have for our Halves prototype:

For the features,

Building height changing

Models of the buildings for two intersections which is S Graham St and Centre Avenue(detailed 8 main buildings, less detailed secondary and tertiary (adjacent) buildings)

Playtesting the building height change feature with the interface

Road type changing feature (the user gets to select from the types we give them as an option)

Example of a road type:

Teleportation from intersection to intersection

Interface UI with 3D pictures

Other than this, we also made an important decision of having a Bird’s Eye View as a feature.

The reason for this being, the navigation option in the prototype is teleporting from one intersection to another. It will be difficult for the users to make changes to the buildings which are in the middle of two intersections. Having Bird’s eye view will solve thi problem as the users can easily select and make changes to the buildings in the middle.

The final Timeline and aschedule of the project has also been determined:

By (10/23/2017)  [week8]

Building height changing

Models of the buildings for two intersections

-Build the buildings in the middle using Photographic texture  method

Playtesting the building height change feature with the interface

WEEK 9: (By 11/02/2017) [week9]

Models in Center avenue (till whole foods)

Playtesting the UI interface with 3D pictures on them and teleportation

WEEK 10: (By 11/09/2017) [week11]

Bird eye view feature

Changes in the environment regarding the pedestrians and traffic

Models for one intersection on Baum corridor

Playtesting the Bird eye view and teleportation

WEEK 12: (By 11/17/2017) [week12]

Zoning feature

Models for two intersections in Baum corridor

 

 

The most important update regarding this week is the presentation we gave our clients on our proposal for the project.

The proposal included the details about our prototype idea:

This prototype would be a look at what future urban planning tools could be like once detailed building information is included in GIS data. We would look at a section of the Baum Corridor and allow the user to make changes to road and sidewalk designs.  We are starting with the intersection of Centre and Graham and working our way east towards Whole Foods. We would provide detailed building models of current Baum Corridor buildings and universal, but highly detailed, buildings to be placed in the scene when zoning changes are made. These universal buildings would be height adjustable, and react to zoning rules (building height limits, distance from the property line).

To make this simulation feel like a real place, we will include people and cars moving about the area in a realistic manner. The number of cars and people would change with the configuration of the area. For instance if the user placed multiple stores in an area, then the number of people would be higher than if the user rezoned the area to be residential. If the area had restaurants then the number of people in the area would be higher at night than if the area only included office buildings.

All of our work creating this prototype will be documented so that it can be added to and modified by later groups.
Immersiveness- Highly immersive

Art Style- Photo Realistic

Tool Kit- Detailed models of building and street options that can be placed in the scene.

Environment Changes- have scene react to changes made by the user, and respond to the presence of the user within the scene.

Data- GIS data would be used to generate surrounding buildings. At the time, tools do not exist to do this automatically within VR and has to be done manually in the Unity editor.

Roads Lane Options:

• Two lanes
• Four lanes
• No on street parking
• One way street
• Bike lanes

Sidewalk Options:

• Adjust the width
• Add elements like trees, benches, plants
• How much space you have to work with would depend on road lane configurations
• Placement of streetlights and how much light they produce at night.

Zoning Options:

• Height adjustments can be made to universal buildings. Universal buildings would be modeled in a way that floors can be repeated and then topped off with a roof. Due to the complex geometry of the realistic building models of Baum Corridor, we can’t make changes to their height.
• Buildings would respond correctly to high level zoning rules; a warning would appear if a building was placed incorrectly.

Weather/Atmospheric Options:

• Changes made within the tool would have realistic shadow effects.
• The area can be viewed at four different times of day: morning, noon, afternoon and night.
• Weather conditions would include sun, rain and snow. These weather effects wouldn’t simulate rain or snow accumulation, but would create the feel of the place during different weather conditions.

Here is the link to our presentation slides with some information on the slides.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7RtxeHKrIZPRnJsVGRMMFFEWXc

The feedback we got from our clients:

The clients are happy with the direction we are planning to go in and they had a request about an additional feature on zoning, which we decided to implement.