Author: jarede

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Documentary- the Whole Thing

The Isetta Engine Team’s Documentary, We Probably Shouldn’t be Doing This was directed and produced by Jared Ettinger.

 

This 10-minute documentary follows the journey of four passionate students as they work tirelessly to build an engine to help others understand how it’s made.

 

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The Rough Cut

Rough Cut

After 2 months of filming, I put together a full rough cut of the documentary. I presented it to faculty advisors, peers, and, of course, the rest of the team. I wrote down and filtered all of the feedback I received and quickly began iterating.

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Documentary Trailer (Halves)

Halves Trailer

Presented at the Isetta Team’s Halves presentation to give faculty and peers a proof-of-concept for the documentary side of the project. At the time, the primary feedback received was focused on audio and visual quality. To iterate on this, I got a newer camera, Rode Shotgun mic, and Lavalier mic from the ETC’s inventory. With those, I was able to reshoot all of the interviews I had previously done.

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Week 4

Byte-Sized Updates

This past week, progress has slowed down significantly for a few reasons. We are at a point now where we are starting to integrate the engine systems together more heavily, which has stopped the development of new features. For example, we are beginning to integrate the memory manager with the other subsystems, but don’t have enough to talk in-depth about this week. Also, our GUI system is heavily reliant on the window system and has its own built-in input, which needed to be abstracted out so we could feed in our own. More to come on that next week.

The biggest road bump this past week was going back through the code and adding Doxygen comments for all of our public facing functions and member variables. This took each of us much longer than expected and we can definitely understand why many developers suggest waiting until a feature is settled to comment on it. We also did a large-scale code review with our faculty and spent a considerable amount of time fixing things. Finally, we have created a demo of the engine’s functionality at this point, which includes: Networking, Audio, Rendering (with animation), Configuration file loading, etc. The demo is located on the demo branch and, at the time of writing, is this commit.

For full write-up see here. The code can be found on the GitHub repo tagged with week-4.

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Week 3

Byte-Sized Updates

  • Architecture Update: We’ve made changes to our design as expected, systems were added and removed based on the criteria of the test game.
  • Input Module: Implemented the input module with polling and callback registration interface.
  • Engine Loop: Moved from a while loop in main to an engine loop with fixed update time step, variable rendering.
  • Timer: Created a clock class to support multiple clocks in-engine.
  • Memory Management: Implemented double buffered allocator and object handle, and currently halfway through defragmentation.
  • Filesystem: System to create/read/write files synchronously and asynchronously using Microsoft’s API.
  • Networking: Created the networking module and wrapper, made some rudimentary message objects, and connected our team from across the void (i.e. the space between our computers)

For full write-up see here. The code can be found on the GitHub repo tagged with week-3.