Way to the implementation

After doing nothing in the previous week, I enforced a great effort to bring out something concrete as I mentioned in my previous post.

First thing I made is to create a very simple federation using PORTICO project. Actually, we thought to use PORTICO project because of its documentation that we assumed it as a comprehensive and detailed documentation. However, after a slight surfing, I realized that user documentation of PORTICO is consist of only a single simple project that shows basic steps of creating federation and federate. It also explains how a federate joins to a federation, how synchronization points are announced, how federates publish objects over the RTI and register other objects, how time policy is controlled, etc. As PORTICO's documentation has come out as a bit disappointing, we think to look for other RTI documentations to go on.

Second development in our project is that we started to write our initial design report. In the initial phase of our design, we tried to ensure our goals about the project. Actually this refers to requirement analysis, but we try to do so much things in the same time that there can be missing points in development. We thought that if we cannot handle a generic terrain or model loading into the environment, there can be some initial terrains and models that can be used for specific goals such as boundary guard, union translation, etc. But users still have the ability of creating new scenarios on preloaded terrains with preloaded units.

Then, we thought about how to make our project modular. We intended to develop a layered architecture, although it is not mature currently, it is thought to have GUI layer, RTI layer, 3DEngine layer and a shared memory layer to provide communication between 3DEngine and RTI layer. Actually, this architecture does not cover all of the project, but it will modified in our following group meetings.

Considering all these factors, we started to write initial design report. Currently, all of us are working different parts of it. Furthermore, we are trying different combinations of operating system, environment and RTI implementations such as Windows, C++, Netbeans; Ubuntu, Java, Netbeans; etc.

I hope we will meet the deficit of the previous week.
Suat Gonul