Day 11: Consolidating everything so far and pressing on!

Diving into Animation 13

Open Day is now over (was fun!) and we have set our sights on the next milestone: a demonstration at Animation 13 on the 12th of July. That gives us 3 weeks precisely, with the demo landing on the Friday of the 3rd week. Stuff will need to be done by then.

Donald's parts seem to have gotten lost somewhere in the loop so a little investigation is underway, as they certainly should have arrived by now.

The XP machine is set back up in the AIG lab after we moved everything for the Open Day, and one of the imminent tasks this week is to upgrade this PC to Windows 7. Speaking of tasks, here's a current lowdown of some of the pending tasks in no particular order:

Adding stuff to the AR demo

Adding sound, new static and dynamic models, investigating inbuilt model animations so that models can be even more impressively dynamic, adding voice recognition.

Useful link for activating inbuilt model animations (method used is to export the models and their animations from Blender (free graphics program) with specific settings that are suitable for XNA):

http://blog.diabolicalgame.co.uk/2011/07/exporting-animated-models-from-blender.html

General tasks

Upgrade the XP PC to Windows 7 after first checking it for any useful data we don't want to lose.

Documenting the entire AR demo program

Building a GUI to do everything

Automating model addition so that everything can be done quickly and from a single GUI, and generating new modelsets automatically so that all new models can be switched to on the fly as soon as they are added.

System for making 3D models of children's heads at Animation 13. Using the above two tasks, an fbx model generated from this system could then be added to the AR program quickly and easily, allowing users to interact with their heads so to speak.

Less important ramblings

Continuing survey of state-of-the-art AR technologies, installing and trying them out.

Moving the entire demo to a new programming environment (XNA is outdated).

Porting the existing AR code to Mac. Google "monodevelop xna mac". Useful link to research when I work on this: http://www.facepuncher.com/blogs/10parameters/?p=32

Win 7 Laptop, the final rundown

Remember that laptop that wouldn't run ARdemo? Well it still won't.

Tried reinstalling all the related software, fully installed the Logitech webcam with its drivers, set the correct config settings, uninstalled the inbuilt webcam of the laptop, still doesn't work.

Symptoms: opens LowryDemo process (aka the augmented reality demo), nothing appears to happen, process ends.

Andy mentioned the problem was either the webcam or the graphics drivers, I ruled out the webcam via extensive testing. Tried debugging in VStudio, it runs without errors and warnings, the code builds, it starts up and then it ends - almost like it's been programmed to end. It doesn't even get to any of the main code. I can ascertain it gets to the initial stages of game.run() but have no idea where it jumps to from there. Presumably some initialization code inside the XNA framework itself from whence it never returns.

Conclusion: proooooobably the graphics.

Decision: buy a new laptop around £650 that is future proof and has decent graphics!

Outcome: Spent a while researching suitable notebooks, right now just waiting to see if finance will agree to buy from saveonlaptops.co.uk (very well priced notebooks, the one that caught my eye cost £50 more from other vendors). Current selection includes:

Lenovo Z500 touch £675: http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/Lenovo_Z500_Touch_1357423.html

(touch screen, best performance, looks sleek)

Acer Ultra M5 £650: http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_Timeline_Ultra_M5-581TG_1316370.html

(has an SSD - superfast hard drive reads and writes for snappy use and quick boot times)

Asus N56VM £630: http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/ASUS_N56VM-S4089V_1360141.html

(bit older but best screen resolution 1920x1080 compared to 1366x768 of the other two, bit lower performance)

All are solid choices. As a reference they are very high performance, able to run recent DX11 games at good framerates at native resolution so are more than suitable for any 3D work.

Sound

Got sound running, Andy had some code that imported and ran some sound files and it works OK. XNA is using its own formats to store and manage the sound, but according to MSDN you can generate your own sound files from the .wav format, or even just feed in .wav sounds via a SoundEffect object. 

You can play and pause sounds, get them to play on events, mess about with volumes and background music etc so there should be quite a playground to explore.

Following resource provides useful information: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb203895(v=xnagamestudio.31).aspx

Also, I can implement keyboard controlled movement of models (like in games), which may be worth investigating to make the demo even more interactive?

Testing continues tomorrow.