Week 8 reflections
From CTIN482
<<Ben Chang>>
Yesterday was the first official planning meeting for our Second Life Music project, now that the team has survived various midterms and other commitments. Personally, I found the session to be very humbling, and after gauging the team for our available time, resources, and interest in certain areas of the project (scripting, music, animations, etc.), we divvied up the tasks and established a production schedule of our key deliverables for November 4th.
The most valuable learning experience for me was learning to prioritize each task, and communicating our desired prototype to the team. As of now, we only have a functional button and a mockup of our actual guitar, so I used some paper illustrations and the College of Music and Scripting to better communicate my ideas. Also given our time constraints, I identified a possible impediment to our original vision (a music learning level that would teach all types of notes and musical notations) which caused us to settle on a prototype that only allows for quater-notes and quarter-rests. Once the prototype is complete, we decided to plan out the next steps for improving the functionality of our teaching tutorial.
<<Ben Chang>>
The Stage - Development
This week we spent some time evaluating whether we wanted to build the scenes from scratch or comb through Second Life and buy the objects and props we would need in the two scenes. After some initial searching, we found several Second Life markets:
Second Life Exchange: http://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace http://www.xstreetsl.com/index.php
Interesting Prim creator: http://www.secondplopp.com/
Star Wars Models: Thunderbird Island Owner: Ryder Spearmann
Whale Model (for Free Willy):
- Animal Island*** Zoo Aquarium Sealife
Owner: Jessop Bay
We were able to find some of the objects we would need for our two scenes for free, such as bicycles, boulders, plants and vegetation, rocks, etc.
After experimenting a bit in world, we decided that whatever we weren't able to find for free, we would just build from scratch ourselves. Even though it would be very cheap to buy the rest of the items, by making them ourselves we'd have greater control over the scripting of the items as well as be able to tailor them to our exact needs. Now that we have our project goals, as well as resources, in place, we're able to start building scenes.
-Jeffrey Pfingsten
