This week we are presenting the Alpha build to the Aspire client.  The presentation was a success and we have lots work ahead of us for the next semester of the project.  I will be scripting the boxes and making the highlights for the boxes as well.  I will also be the voice of the manager and I will have to speak loudly and clearly.  The alpha build was a success and I am planning my work for the next semester.

I finally got my kismet in the map where the simulation we are all working, but unfortunately noe of my kismet is working.  What my part is suppose to do is when the player's cursor is over the box it will highlight the box with a light green color indicating the box is selected.  The player clicks on the box and the HUD will showup and when the player presses the pickup button the box will be automatically transfer to the player.  The player can move around with the box and when the player presses the drop button the box will be detached from the player.  I needed to adjust the height of the box when it is dropped when I get the kismet for the box to work.  I am contacting my team members to help me solve this problem, so that we can test out the simulation.

I finally got the concept of whar kind of kismet I should work on for the boxes, I never worked with TextureRender2D or opening a GFX movie before in UDK.  It was confusing at first to learn about this new kind of kismet, but eventually I figured it out with some help.  I need to create a test HUD since the real HUD for the simulation was not done yet.  I created a simple HUD with only 2 buttons to test out the kismet.  I also needed to create the material for the box and that requires the TextureRender2D.  Once everything is made and imported into UDK the real work begins.  The opening the GFX movie step was not as difficult as I though it was, but the TextureRender2D and boolean check value part gave me some problems.  At first the selection part of the box was out of range of the box and was not checking the bool value.  We got that to work and now the 2 buttons needed to in the HUD were pickup and drop.  Kismeting the 2 buttons were easy and didnt cause much problems.  I need to put this kismet into the final map and hope everything turns out alright.  In the meantime I need to fix the postion of the box when it is dropped, so it doesn't looke like it is floating in mid-air.

I started to work on the kismet for the boxes this week and suddenly my laptop crashed  and I lost all my data.  In the project meeting I found out the method for the boxes I was working on was wrong, so I had to restart my kismet over again.  This time I know that I need to use Flash player and UDK to make the clickable objects.  I am very inexperienced with this method since I have never worked with it before.  I will try my best to make the boxes work the way we want it to.  This week I have a lot of work and research to do and hope I can finish on time.