GSOC 2017- Week 1 post-mortem and week 2 plans

In my last weeks blog post, I mentioned about implementation of the basic structure of the levels. The progress are listed as follows:

• The activity consists of 10 levels as of now
• The dynamic components of the levels are added, namely: the submarine, the upper and lower gates, ship, whale, rocks and the crown along with the animations for the objects that require them
• Tutorials for the initial three levels
• Started out with basic movements of the submarine

Here is a screenshot of a level from the activity:

The thing that is not yet implemented:

• The UI of the controls itself. As of now, the control bar of the submarine is fixed at the bottom of the screen. As a result of this, it hides gets hidden by the bar, which is disabled on start for avoiding the same reasons. I am planning to change the overall controls of the submarine compared to the gtk+ version, but as of now haven’t decided which way to go. I will start improving it once I get an idea on handling the controls which will solve the above problem along with making the controls much more intuitive

For this week, I will be working on the following:

• Player movement using engines, rudders and ballast tanks [IN PROGRESS]
• Collision detection: collision of the submarine with the ships, gates, whale, crown and the rocks [IN PROGRESS]
• crown pickup mechanism: detect pickup of the crown and open the gate likewise
• “level failed” conditions: in case of any collisions or when the time is up (gate closes in such cases)

In later blog posts, I will be discussing the implementation of the movement and collision using Box2D and the codebase of the activity in general.

Well, that’s it for now! If you wish to have a look at the codebase or follow it up, it is in the gsoc_rudra_submarine branch of gcompris. A mirror of the repository is also available on Github (link for the gsoc_rudra_submarine branch on Github).