This week, in addition to working on the final presentation slides, I added the ability to clear all rendered lines from the screen in order to “start over” as well as added an on-screen debugging log for easier troubleshooting and game status tracking. I have also written out and finally been able to get to work the scripts that get cloud anchoring to work on one device, in a separate test game scene (not our actual game scene). What would be left would be to integrate this cloud anchoring into the previously written line algorithm scripts and main game scene, as well as use Unity’s networking package to get the cloud anchoring functional across multiple devices. After that, finetuning of the timing of API calls would be necessary.
Considering that we effectively only have 1 week left of classes before finals week and are still having a little trouble fully integrating the hardware and software (improperly formed/calibrated data is able to be sent over from the hardware and rendered by the software), I have looked into backup options of viewing our game on multiple devices. This is due to the fact that even if a fully functional multiple device cloud anchoring was able to be coded in this last week, we would have to worry about not only integrating this software with the hardware on a single device, but across multiple separate devices, which would require even more code to be written in order to separate game states, and actions between separate users.
Due to the unfeasibility of all of this given the remaining timeframe, I have instead gotten to work a way of screen sharing our game running on our host android device to another device/laptop that would be displayed on a big monitor. This was done with an application called TeamViewer, which allows one device to be used as a host and other devices to hook into this device and view what is being displayed on it. Therefore, all users would still effectively be able to see what is being drawn in the real world and guess in real-time, and the drawer would simply be changed to whoever holds the host device and pen.
This change would work towards putting our project as a whole back on track, allowing us to have a refined and functional project by final demo time. This week I plan to help the team with refinement of the line rendering algorithm that takes in the data gotten from the hardware as well as thoroughly test and refine the game as a whole into an easy-to-use and smooth experience.