Sunday, August 19, 2012

Pencils down tomorrow (updated)

Thanks to my mentor Alexander Wolf, and Stellarium. The hard pencils-down date is tomorrow, so I'll clean up the code, add documentation, and do some last minute edits, then push the finalized branch tomorrow when I have a better Internet connection. Will post a link to that branch here.

The promised deliverables were pretty much met:
- Added comets to ssystem.ini
- Instead of control in Sky Tab, on Alex Wolf's suggestion, made functions for users to script and thereby control the tail/ coma appearance. Scripting is easy though, and I also provided an example script comet_control.ssc
- Drew plasma tail and dust tail realistically. However, implementation for dust tail can be improved in the future to be physically realistic.

Future:
- Was unable to do the optional deliverables (nucleus split, sun collision) during this time frame.
- To improve dust tail (and coma if needed)
--> Dust tail's drawing is not physically accurate, for now just looks feasible. Have to project fan-on-a-plane dust tail into 2D coordinates on the screen
---> after that, may need to implement coma-specific function

Misc notes:
- Overestimated what could be achieved within the time frame. Had school and exams during Community Bonding Period and first 3 weeks of GSoC, then last 2 weeks of GSoC.
- Changed implementation several times; the final solution was usually a lot simpler and different from what I thought it would be in the proposal
- Took some time to get familiar with code base, working in a large project, and using Bazaar
- Took too long on one bug, went the wrong route, spending 1+ months trying to even put something on the screen correctly

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