Wardsend Cemetery. Work in Progress.

It has been quite a stressful day, and evening too, especially the evening actually. Tomorrow is the presentation and submission day and only this afternoon our project has started to get the right shape in Unity. Until then, each of us worked separately on individual tasks and there was not a place where all components would be put together and visible progress would be seen. When a room model, painting cut into planes and 3D models were put together in a Unity scene, it really looked like an environment for a VR experience. It was great to be able to present Annie with this piece, as even though that scene was unfinished, it was a result of our work and many struggles that we managed to overcome during these past weeks. 

The amount of work to be done is still massive. From implementing all the sound effects Collin has worked on, through adding billboards animations, animating the train and adding its steam (that Will made based on particle system), to eventually, building the app and running it in VR. Next there will be further testing and fixing bugs, before the release day. 

To speed up the work, every person in the group jumps on extra tasks and works on elements or actions beyond their originally assigned role, which is great. I offered to work with people models I had created before. I knew I would be able to assign missing textures, and/or redownload those models if needed. I was to scale and place them in the correct spots in the main scene in Unity, so they were corresponding with the painting layout. It took me roughly one hour to have 3 models in the scene as I had to work with textures and missing materials (as expected), rescale them and place them on the hills appearing in the painting. I then saved my local changes and pushed them to our GitHub repository. Unfortunately, someone was working on the main scene at exactly the same time, and we had a merge conflict as a result. I could not get it fixed and asked my partner for help. Meanwhile, I contacted my group and Will responded quickly. He had decided that reverting changes would be the best solution in that situation. As a result, some changes were lost, including my people’s input. I was aware of that possibility and knew that I would have to spend another hour tonight to have those 3 models back in the main scene. This time, I created a test scene in Unity and worked on prefabs there. After all 3 models were ready, I contacted the group and asked about their work status. I asked for a green light to make changes in the main scene and was granted it. After adding all necessary game objects and saving the project on my local git folder, I checked the status of our GitHub repo, pulled the code from it, added my changes, committed them, and pushed an updated version of the project to the online repository. This time everything went smoothly, without any issues, merge conflicts etc. 

Situations like this can add extra tension to the collaboration, but it is important not to panic but to find a solution to a crisis. Even though the issue was related to GitHub, it was a human error (most likely mine), and GitHub is a great tool that made our group work easier. I was not familiar with using this version control tool until we had started this current project but was aware of its existence. Since then, I noticed that it is an industry standard to comfortably operate within this tool, therefore, I am setting myself a goal of learning GitHub over the summer holidays. That would be my second challenge for the incoming two months, next to Unreal Engine learning.  

The current status of the project is not something we were expecting to have at this time, sadly, it is less than we originally planned. On a positive note, we are heading in the right direction and have the actual prototype to present to the clients. We have 10 more days to have it completed and polished, and I am really looking forward to testing it in VR.  

This collaborative project was quite unusual. We mainly worked remotely – due to the Covid-19 that is a regular style of work for many companies now and in my opinion, it was great training before we will all start our professional careers. There were some communication and leadership issues, but I think that in the end we are managing just fine. Luckily, there are online tools supporting remote work, both individual and group, such as mentioned GitHub; but also, Trello, Google drive and Discord. They have all been around for a while now, but during this collaboration, they were especially useful. 

Overall, despite the odds, my course colleagues and I were able to work on a real-life VR project and knew how to develop the idea and build a virtual experience. It proves the progress we all have made since starting our VR degree, highlights our determination and ability to work as team-players to achieve a common goal.