Improvements

This video gives a good overview of the project, not all features, but the important ones:

Since the previous devlog many improvements have been made, so I decided to point out one of them which I really like:

synchronize user movement with paddle animation

This feature was both fun and pain in one. The basic idea was to prepare the animation in blender and then map it to the users position. At first had to deal with animations in blender which I never had done before. Afer a hard learning I got it right the way I wanted. Now I had to write an algorithm that answers the question: “at which point in time of the animation the user actually is, .. in percent?” This took another while to get it right. In the end the algorithm works with flexible constraints since on a rowing machine not all persons will have same lengthed legs and so have different forward-/backward-maxima which need to be considered. Mapping the direction and position to the animation required another few watts of brain power. But in the end I am happy with the result which is super robust and does not contain any of those little errors or glitches I faced while developing it. As a helper I created a “diagnostics dialog” which shows some values at runtime, this was quite helpful to get things right and so I decided to keep it. I gave it a prominent place in the main dialog with the intention to put more,various diagnostics data when necessary.

enhancements

• update logo
• cleanup app initialisation
• bluetooth activity indicator
• allow to confugre background size without scaling the background container node (dev editor feature)
• tween opened dialogs to scale to bring some life into the UI
• allow rocks to be placed under water and also a bit higher
• adding shadows to infinite terrain scene makes clear: every track needs its own lighing
• add special start terrain tile so user does not look into nowhere at the start of the track
• consider track_lenth 0 as ‘infinite’

fixes

• fix to disable nonvisible background colliders
• ui fixes, start playing around with tests
• fix rolling water, afterwards make adjustments to all waters in tracks
• enhance infinite terrain: water
• fix regatta water, make it unique recursively