Brief 4

Well this brief was short and sweet, and hell, I got to do mathematics that, as I said in the overview, I didn't think I would ever be using past high school, so that's pretty cool.

I got the brief done in a matter of hours, which was probably the fastest time I have ever completed a brief in for any of my modules. I had to seek help from a fellow classmate by the name of Frazer who gave me a pretty good rundown of what I needed to do, and because of his help, I was able to figure out what exactly I needed to do and get it all done within a few hours. I used the template available on the unit website to help me with the production of this brief.

The first part was a zombie vision system. Basically, it was to calculate if a player was within the vision cone of a zombie and, if they were within that cone, the distance between the player and zombie and how long it would take for the zombie to reach the player's position. I placed the player on a random point on the X and Z axis and then did the same for a zombie, defined some more things about the zombie such as its field of view (the vision cone), the direction it's facing, the speed at which it moves on average and the maximum view distance (the magnitude). These cells so far had no equations or functions to them whatsoever, and were just raw data input cells. The rest of the cells were all used equations that called back to other cells, which for quite a few of them I needed Frazer to explain the mathematical formulas to me to help me to properly understand how it works so I could write out the formulas and descriptions myself. I also created a graph showing where exactly the player and zombie were in relation to each other.

Part 2 was the physics kill system, which was basically a hypothetical situation where the player climbs up a tower and then drops a rock which falls on top of a zombie, killing it. Like the part before, I started off with the raw data input cells like the height of the tower, the climbing speed of the player, the time the zombie is aggressive for and the minimum speed the rock must be traveling at to kill the zombie. I then did calculations of the amount of time it takes for the rock to fall and hit the target area, the maximum speed that the rock reaches before hitting the ground and the total time from start to finish, which all feed into one system of whether or not the rock will ultimately kill the zombie.

Part 3 was the ballistic missile trajectory calculation. This was basically calculating how a ballistic missile's travel path is affected over time with gravity. I created a set of data that goes up to 40 metres within 4 seconds, with the main calculation of this data being the distance that the ballistic missile travels vertically over time and distance. I set parametres such as the angle that the ballistic missile would be shot at, the initial velocity that the ballistic missile would be traveling at, etc., and with all the calculations in place, this created a parabola to show the ballistic missile launching upward into the air and then being pulled down by gravity before hitting the ground. I also created a line graph to show this parabola visually.

This brief was commenced and completed way too late instead of being done while I was working on brief 3 for this class like everybody else did. It was the last brief I commenced out of all the other briefs for all the classes because I was more focused on getting the briefs I had already started out of the way first, and then moving onto this brief. I was pretty happy that I was able to get it done in such a short amount of time, however.

There are two points I'd like to talk about.

Firstly, getting Frazer to help me—I think getting Frazer to help me try to understand this was a really good call on my behalf as he really helped me understand how things worked and ultimately helped me get the brief done. I felt a bit ashamed that I was getting him to help me do this at such a late time, but he didn't seem to bothered by it which was good. I think Frazer is a really good person to work with as he's very helpful and, even better, knows what he's doing, and this is also coming from experience from when I worked with him in brief 1.

Lastly, starting this brief too late—obviously that was not a good call at all. The way I was going about this was to finish the briefs I was already doing and then start on this brief, which just wasn't going to go my way at all considering even the other briefs took a while to do. What I think I should have done is start the brief and complete small milestones as I'm working with other briefs and other classes. I think doing this will allow me to complete these briefs earlier than whatever I call this completion date.

Now that this class is over, I can spend the free time figuring out a solution to my time and organization problem. I do have this handy tool called Trello that I can use to keep track of what needs doing, but I should also see about looking into any alternatives as well just in case Trello doesn't work out for me.

I will also make sure to not continue with all modules each trimester for my own sake, so I will make sure to drop one or, at the extreme, two modules so I get decreased overall workload, which is workload that I can actually handle and not be overwhelmed by. The consequence of this is that I will remain at the college for longer, but in my personal opinion, I wouldn't even consider that a consequence.