Circuit Adventures

Hello Bloggers,

As we continued to work on our circuit portion of our project we decided that our idea of creating a circuit building sandbox area was going to take far more time than we had left. After discussing the matter with our professor he advised us to create some demos to show off Ohm's Law and have the numbers on the voltage and resistors be intractable that way the player could still learn the lesson they needed to learn by watching how the current changed throughout a circuit given different configurations. This ended up being a very useful way to explain our lesson!

In the future if we have more time hopefully we can revisit our circuit building sandbox idea and create an even better environment for the player to interact in!

Scrapped Circuits Designs

We're in the final stretch of our project! We have been working hard on creating a Circuits demo and reached some hurdles getting there.
Our first idea was to use RayCast to draw lines to act as wires, but we soon realized that this simply wasn't possible. The only thing we found to draw with the lines at all was a Debug command, which did not work with what we wanted.
We then decided to create a grid which would allow us to "snap" pieces into place in order to allow users to create their own complicated circuits. While this is theoretically possible, we found it extremely hard to actually implement. The necessary algorithms to make it work correctly were just too complex with the time we had.
We would have needed to create a data structure in order to track proximity with other aspects of the circuit that would have taken weeks to formulate and implement.
So our final solution we ended up implementing was creating four scenes that had the circuits already set up and allowing users to change the values present in order to see how different set ups changed the interactions between components.

Bugs

Hello Bloggers!

It's been a short while since we last talked, and we believe we have a video that has summed up the interaction we have had with Unity in a perfect manner. We have just been running into bug after bug, and I thought what better way to inform those that tread after me then to give an account of the most hilarious and frustrating bugs we have faced thus far.

Our hurdles began within our demo with the legendary cannon within our Newtonian Laws lesson. This cannon was so messed up from the beginning we molded multiple cylinders, spheres, and cubes together to form its prefab. In order to originally produce proper physics when firing the cannon we tried to use quaternions. A word to the wise, don't mess with quaternion angles unless you have at least a masters in mathematics. A bug persisted in the way the angles were shown, how the angles updated in the barrel of the cannon, and how the cannonballs were fired off. It would essentially just fire balls straight up, leaving us with no cannon at all just a glorified stacker.

Then, we have the hurdles that still loom in front of us. For our menu there seems to be a problem with the line-renderer so that users are unable to toggle the functionality of buttons in the menu. This is coupled with the bug that randomly changes the line-renderer's pigment based on the location of our directional light, which we have masqueraded as a rising and setting Sun. The problems compound still if you look at the amusing video posted above. The never ending spawning of objects has plagued us a few times, but this is by far the most comical. All we simply had to do to fix this was change one small integer. It's funny how the tiniest of numbers can have the most amazing impacts.

I'm sure many other bugs await us in our journey with this application, but the most important part of development is to look at these bugs with a smile and undaunted spirit. One solution always leads to another problem, but in a way that is the beauty of programming. The things you can do will never run dry. So, hopefully if any of you are facing daunting tasks you can read this and look at programming for the beauty that it holds rather than the frustration that it causes. All in all, stay strong, and thanks for reading.