Ongoing Investigations

Category: Internal

  • Game Dev and Green Dot

    I spent today looking into some small game development engines that might be interesting to play around with. One which caught my attention was Wick, which looks like it’s meant to be an animation software that also has interactive features. I haven’t used it for anything yet, but I was charmed by one of the YouTube tutorials that shows off interactivity (there’s a drawing of a little mouse!)

    Unfortunately, it looks like it’s at its most powerful if you’re familiar with Javascript. The tutorials give a bit of instruction as to what built-in functions are available, and how you might create some new functionality, but knowing code would make it a lot stronger. The interactivity tutorial shows you the basics a beginner might need to make a point-and-click adventure, which is fun but not flashy. Also, there might be options to upload images, but all the art in the tutorial looks hand-drawn in the editor, which will be a barrier for anyone who’s self conscious about their digital art skills.

    I also attended Green Dot training, where we talked about the skills and strategies one can employ to counteract instances of sexual violence or misconduct.

    The training covered two main areas: Reactive Green Dots, or actions one can take when one sees an instance in progress, and Proactive Green Dots, or actions one can take to build a community that is well informed about, equipped to address, and culturally against sexual violence and misconduct. Reactive Green Dots came in three flavors: distract, direct, and delegate, meaning to divert the situation indirectly, to directly address either the perpetrator or the target, and to seek backup or help either through official channels (Campus Security, Community Concern Forms) or unofficial ones.

    Being in stay-at-home mode so far away from campus makes Green Dot and its training feel sort of removed for me. I’m very glad I went, and I feel more equipped to just… respond to situations where I might otherwise freeze up, but it feels like those situations aren’t very likely to come up right now. I hope they don’t.

  • Planning with Omeka S

    Over the course of the next month or so, we’ll be developing an Omeka S site to host translations of medieval documents — which means we need to know how Omeka S works. Today (and over the course of the next week or so) I’m taking a dive into Omeka S’s documentation in order to prep. The documentation is available here, in case you were curious.

    I won’t rehash it, because explaining a lot of the technical stuff will get boring fast, but the main takeaways of the beginning are much more geared towards questions of design and planning than specific fiddly technical bits. So that’s what I’ve been thinking about in the context of our project. They’re good questions to ask of any project, but I’m going to answer them here specifically for what we’re doing, because… yeah.

    Who is our audience? Primary, or secondary? Our primary audience will be historians who want to reference medieval documents; our secondary audience, if we decide to make this part of the project, might be translators looking to share their work. That’ll need to be another conversation.

    What do we want people to be able to do on our site? The site’s primary concept is as a searchable repository: we want people to be able to locate useful documents based on the metadata associated with them. That means we don’t need many pages of context, beyond perhaps a description of the project; the scholarship being done is in the presence of the content. The open-ended issue here relates to the first question: do we want translators to be able to share their work? That’s functionality we can add… but is it functionality we need?

    How are we thinking about what’s on our site? Omeka S operates using items, which have properties (metadata…ish?) associated with them; the items can be grouped into item sets, which also have properties. Items, item sets, and media can be used as properties for other items and item sets.

    This is probably the blurriest part right now. Each translation will almost definitely be its own item, but what will the core theme of each item set be – if we even have item sets? Will we end up making other features of the translations items, in order to create a better network through properties? (IE, if we have multiple translations from the same author, should we make the author also an item, so that we can navigate from the translation to the author to other translations?)

    This would be a question to answer before we get started, since it would inform everything about how we enter the data. It’s not a bad idea, but scope creep is… not something to take lightly, and we need to do some time estimations.

    Goals for planning, then:

    • Plan out our rough stages (given what we need the site to do, what do we build first? When/how do we add the translations, and how do we store them?)
    • Ballpark the amount of time each stage might take
    • Figure out who should be doing what, depending on the amount of time we have, what our deadlines are, and who’s busy when
    • And of course, keep reading the documentation

  • Thinking Through Progress

    This’ll just be a bit of a ramble to sort of work through my plans. Topics: the Creator Kit: Beginner Code Kit, the VR Beginner kit, designing & planning my own Unity projects.

    Beginner Code Kit

    I’ve left the Beginner Code kit so long that I can’t really remember what I was in the middle of (or where I left my files) when I was last working on them. Teach me to write up my escapades better.

    My last Beginner Code post was about finishing up the core units, not about the day I spent wrestling with writing original code from scratch. The primary reason is because I spent that day reading documentation trying to figure out what I needed to access, so I didn’t feel that I had anything to write up, but I was wrong. Oh, I was wrong.

    Probably the next step would be to go back and restart the write-from-scratch unit, working through the documentation again. It’ll be a pain to start over, but it’s the cleanest way I have of making sure it happens.

    The goal of this write-from-scratch in Beginner Code is not necessarily to mod the game, by the way. It’s to just… have something I came up with and wrote myself work. That’ll be a big win for me.

    VR Beginner Kit

    After the Beginner Code kit I have two VR tutorials on deck: one about an escape room and one that’s just a beginner’s guide. They look about comparable, which means I think I’ll go with the escape room, since it involves puzzles (hopefully).

    It’s not supposed to involve much programming, if any, which means that I’ll mostly be getting oriented in VR and thinking about how to design for it instead of doing the coding principles. Maybe I should look up a more advanced coding tutorial as well…

    Planning Projects

    The line to thread on projects is something that’s a) interesting, b) achievable, and c) relevant. A project I don’t care about is a project that will suffer; a project that I can’t accomplish (even if I have to stretch and grow to do it) is pointless; a project that isn’t useful is doomed.

    As far as Unity goes, we don’t have a lot of call right now that I can see for a project, though thinking about potential AR applications around campus might have legs. In the meantime, it’s possible I’ll try and keep my hand in by programming smaller projects outside of Unity, to keep in the mindset and the habit.

    I do have potential game ideas that would be a good way to practice full-scale development in Unity… hm.

  • Writing Documentation

    The title really says it all: that’s what I’ve been up to recently.

    So, yes — coding, VR and AR development, learning Unity — it’s all taken a bit of a backseat in an attempt to get some more time consuming and generally relevant tasks taken care of. We’ve solved an issue with some web addresses that were bouncing, posts have been migrated from one site to another, but there are still general logistics for the migration going on.

    The first is just… making sure there’s general useful documentation for our sites. Our setup is a bit unique, so the current documentation isn’t really what we need, and in any case it focuses a lot more on the general set up than the day-to-day tasks.

    The second is tracking our sites. We have a lot of sites installed, but some of those sites have subsites (not included in the installation count), and other sites are HTML-based and therefore not installations (and therefore, uncounted). I’ve been going through each subdomain and tallying up each site, trying to figure out who’s responsible for what and why.

    Writing up documentation is a lot more fun than I thought it would be. Thinking through where I’ve run into challenges vs. where others might have issues, and what’s easy to miss but very important… it’s an interesting puzzle. I’m enjoying the process of it. Part of it may also be that I just like writing, and documentation is a good way to keep my hand in. Site tracking is a lot more data entry, so it’s less stimulating, but an audiobook or a podcast in the background keeps my ears going while my brain stays on task.

    I’ve been trying out Instagantt, an organizational tool someone else on my team recommended. So far… extremely mixed results.

    There’s nothing wrong with the tool itself or any of its features. I like what bits of it I get the chance to use. It’s easy to add tasks, I like the way it tracks tasks and subtasks, marking off tasks is satisfying, it keeps track of lots of information, it’s supposed to be very good for team collaboration…

    Except I inevitably cannot keep the page loaded for more than forty-five seconds to a minute without it freezing.

    I tested it in multiple browsers. Firefox catches the issue faster than Chrome, but it’s there in both. My only thought right now is that it might be a Windows compatibility issue, but that would be extremely weird for a team product.

    I want it to work. I really do. It’s much, much better than my Google Sheets Gantt charts — or it would be, if I could use it.

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