User talk:Alexlevenson

Weekly Updates

I will keep a log here of my progress each week.

Week of 6/2/2008

• Starting to settle in here at OLPC Cambridge
• Began setting up a demo XO that shows off many non-standard capabilities of the XO
  • Progress and goals can be found on the wiki page
• Began discussing my future projects
  • Physics Game / Incredible Machine clone
  • IDE (based on Develop?)

Week of 6/9/2008

• Continued work on the demo project
• Began discussing with Brian about ways to attack physics projects
  • Decided we need to update elements
    • Elements is nice, but WIP
    • Isn't ready for use
    • However, pyBox2D not user friendly
• Wrote a very simple elements demo for demo build

Week of 6/16/2008

• Went to Joint Warfighting Conference with SJ, Seth, and Richard (from OLPC DC)
  • Gave demos to and informed conference goers about the project
  • Met many high up people with high levels of interest, including
    • Education board of AFCEA
    • Now retired but extremely influential member of AFCEA who brought AFCEA to the EU
    • Military personnel very interested in the project
• Would really like to begin updating elements (possibly with Brian) next week (well the week after that because I won't be here)

Week of 6/23/2008

I will be in Kentucky rebuilding houses for people in need all week. See everyone 6/30/2008.

Week of 6/30/2008

I've been making big progress on the physics playground game, which is a building block for the incredible machine game. This week I've added:

• Tools
  • Box -- draws a box of any dimension
  • Circle -- draws a circle of any radius
  • Triangle -- draw an equilateral triangle of any size and orientation
  • Polygon -- draw a polygon point by point
  • Magic Pen -- draw any shape you'd like!
  • Grab -- grab + throw objects
  • Joint -- add joints between any objects
• Menus for all the tools mentioned above
• Code can be found in our git repository: http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=activities/physics

I've also been working on an ubuntu boot on an SD card, still in progress..

Week of 7/7/2008

Continuing work on the physics playground game...

Continuing work on the Ubuntu SD card...

Lots of progress to see on Physics!!!!

Week of 7/14/2008

I've started to branch away from the physics playground and I'm starting my own project, which I initially proposed for GSOC.

It's called x2o and it's a puzzle solving game similar to the Incredible Machine

Week of 7/21/2008

I've added many components to x2o such as bouncy balls, ramps, bowling balls, see-saws, and fans.

more to components to be added as I think of them.

I'm also re-writing a lot of the elements package (box2D wrapper + simplification)

I've also added some basic level completion and level loading

Week of 7/28/2008

I've decided that although elements is very nice for simple projects, it's getting in the way more than it's helping me currently. I'm going to use pyBox2D (Swig python binding of box2d) directly from now on. So this is a bit of a step backwards before I can go forwards, removing elements from my code.

Also I've added level loading, saving, resetting, and reverting -- very key aspects to the game.

I'm coding furiously in order to have a stable and impressive demo (version 1.0) by the end of next week when my internship officially ends

That said, I will continue to develop x2o after my internship, but I'd like something cool to show off by then :)