Sprint Review

Our iterative, agile development approach and task center.
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Trilarion
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Sprint Review

Post by Trilarion »

This is where the volunteers of the previous week's sprint come together and post their completed work from the sprint. Volunteers also use this as a work journal where they describe what went right and wrong for them in the last sprint.
  • Results: Post your sprint results.
  • Reflection: Write how your sprint went and draw conclusions about improvements for future sprints.
  • Review: Control of the quality of all sprint results by other contributors and/or team leaders before they are included in the project content.
Please:
  • Do not forget to post your results in this thread!
  • Only post here if you post results or reflect on or review the results of a sprint!
(see also FAQ)
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Trilarion
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Review period

Post by Trilarion »

28th June to 5th July
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Trilarion
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My button graphics sprint

Post by Trilarion »

Went quite well. At least I could replace all placeholder graphics with... more fancy placeholder graphics.
buttons.jpg
buttons.jpg (8.94 KiB) Viewed 16672 times
What I did:
  • First I made a wodden texture according to a Photoshop tutorial
  • Then I tried to give it a golden edge (inner glow effect)
  • Then I experimented with the sizes: I ended up with 64x32 being the best. (32x16 in the case of the last two icons)
  • Then I searched for suitable icons for the content/inner part within the free sik-icon set (famfamfam).
  • Then I put them in an overlay layer with overlay mode: luminosity and opacity values between 50 and 100%.
Here are the ideas:
  • Circle with triangle (Play symbol) = Scenario start button
  • Single person: Single player scenario selection button
  • Open door with error: Exit/back button
  • Two persons with line in the middle: connect to multiplayer server button
  • Two persons with cross in the middle: disconnect from multiplayer server button
  • Disc on left side, arrow to the right side: load scenario
  • World sphere on a sheet: New scenario button
  • Disc on left side, arrow to the left: save scenario
  • Mountains: Geographical view in minimap
  • Flag: Political view in minimap
I am not a graphics artist and these graphics are not supossed to end up in version 1.0, they are just placeholders until we arrive at something really artistical valuable. However they do the job for now and so I am satisfied with this sprint.

In future versions, the discs should be replaced by something more adequate to 19th century. The content icons have to be reworked. Better wood texture and golden edges can be included. Other ideas should be pursued. Creator could do it maybe if he comes back. Unfortunately I couldn't use his work because he did not provide source files for start screen (wood texture, golden edge). So I cannot modify these things and have to work around until the sources are somehow available.
Veneteaou
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Re: Sprint Review

Post by Veneteaou »

Those look really good.

My sprint went... Not so well. The sun came out, and I lost all desire to work. I'm gonna take a week to screw around drawing and see if I can pique my creativity and drive enough to sprint again a week from now.
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Trilarion
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Programming sprint

Post by Trilarion »

Also went too slowly. Not all the goals are reached. Basically what is still missing is the full implementation of continuous tiles which we have already but somewhere else. Anyway there is a current lack of continuuous tiles so this is all not critical. And I can fully understand the desire to enjoy the sun. Here it is great sun too and today I won't work on the project. Fortunately for the project the sun isn't that nice all the time of the year. :)
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Trilarion
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Review period

Post by Trilarion »

5th July to 12th July
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Trilarion
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Game mechanics discussion

Post by Trilarion »

I couldn't do anything for this sprint and so it should count as failed. The reason was that I had to finish the other sprints from the previous week and make everything ready for release. In other words: I overestimated my capabilities.

Anyway I will continue with this task but not within a sprint because it will take longer than a week anyway. I might do some subtasks as weeklong sprints though.
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Trilarion
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Testing the framework Qt and looking at terrain

Post by Trilarion »

The Sprint was successful insofar as I could ascertain that everything will work as I imagined it with relative low effort. The resulting images shown in the Dev Blog are not that elaborate as I wanted them to be. It would need more time. Nevertheless I'm satisfied because in principle a way to have nicely looking continuous terrain has been found.

Making it really good will be time for another Sprint.
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Trilarion
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Testing and providing solutions for playing audio in Python

Post by Trilarion »

Now this Sprint topic was more difficult than I thought initially. Well, sometimes easy things are surprisingly difficult. Some lessons I learned new or had the pleasure to refresh:
  • Using a multiplattform library doesn't mean that it behaves the same on all plattforms. You always have to test it and limit yourself to solutions that most probably will not fail on all plattforms (Windows and Linux I can test (and must), Mac? we will se)
  • Learning a new framework is more than just looking up the API reference. You actually have to learn to conventions, the typical ways of doing things. It's specific for every framework and not everything is documented.
  • Don't put too many things into a Sprint. Most things, even simple things take some time to get done. One week is not that much. Of course I would like to start on a thousand things but realistically I can only make one thing. Therefore it's better to set smaller goals for Sprints and increase the amount if necessary than failing to reach the end all the time.
That's the collected wisdom so far. :)
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Trilarion
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Recreating the Start Screen

Post by Trilarion »

This Sprint had to be only 6 days long. I did not reach my goals but only around 70% of it. I had enough time to spend but GUI programming with Qt is more difficult than I thought, especially there are some small things like the inbuilt 1 pixel border in QGraphicsView or WA_StyledBackground attribute necessary in QWidget that I didn't know of and that are kind of counter-intuitive. But then that's the way one becomes an expert in these things.

Overall I'm satisfied.
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