Testing

I have tested the nearly-finished project on two groups, one in the 20-40 age bracket and one in the 60-70 age bracket. 

A female tester aged over 60 really liked the project; she thought the landscape and models were impressive. She also found the controls very simple to use, an issue I had been worried about. She suggested that there were not enough objects to click on and look at; this is a valid criticism, but for purposes of this project it was necessary only to have one working object as making more would be repeating work already done. I would definitely expand the amount of objects if continuing work with the project, however. She also suggested the landscape was too sparse and that I should add trees and vegetation, a suggestion borne out by members of the 20-40 group.

A male tester aged over 60 thought the project was useful from a historical point of view. However, he had no interest in learning to use the controls and asked that I navigate around it for him. This could be a problem, as many people of this age group will not have  used similar applications such as video games and may not be interested in trying. It may be necessary to make more intuitive controls of a click-and-drag nature. This was my original plan but time constraints did not allow for it. He also wanted to get inside the crannog, which was part of my original plan but I did not follow through on it due to my decision to make the museum open air. In later incarnations I would be willing to make explorable architecture, which will involve significant work with lighting and baking textures. Again, time constraints do not allow me to do this at the moment, but it is something to think about. Both members of this group wanted the Unity player to be smaller, so that the whole player is viewable as you click into the homepage, so I will attempt to do this.

There were four testers in the 20-40 group, 3 male and 1 female. All enjoyed the project, but many were curious about what would happen if they went off the edge of the terrain, so it will be necessary to add more barriers to prevent this. One expressed a desire to explore the lake, but this goes beyond the scope of the project, as there is no facility at Lough Gur to explore beneath water level. One male, aged between 25 and 30, thought the texture on the crannog needed work. I agree, but this is again something I would do in conjunction with making it explorable.

During the testing process, some of the browsers were more suitable than others. Safari is currently my preferred browser for this project. It works well on Firefox as well, but many people use very restrictive pop-up blockers when using this browser, making it impractical. I will advise my users on the best choice of browser on the homepage, perhaps in the splash screen on the web application.

Outdoor museum?

I rebuilt the terrain to look more like the natural landscape of Lough Gur. I roughly copied the shape of the lake. I placed mountains around it. These do not follow the topography of the real Lough Gur, as I would need access to digital maps to be able to do a really accurate depiction, so I decided it was best to approximate it and take artistic license with it. I imported my assets with textures, and the size of the assets compared to the terrain was not what I expected it to be. I tweaked things a little bit, and then placed the plinth and macehead next to the lake. I really like the way this looks, and I would actually really like to leave it like this and do away with the architecture. The idea here would be to dot several plinths around the landscape and have the user navigate to them, clicking on each item for information. It allows for an outdoor museum where you can look at the objects in the context of the environment rather than inside a building. I may still place the crannog somewhere as a museum object, but I think the idea of the openair museum is much more engaging, and I prefer the aesthetic sense of it.

Inside the museum

I may not have the textures sorted out yet, but I have a macehead on a plinth inside the crannog-museum, which is progress. I'm not made about the scaling here - I modelled all the game assets to scale in 3ds max and it looks like I have a lot of extra space in the museum that I don't need. I think the scaling is actually correct though, I think it's just that I expected it to look a little bit different. I thought I might have time to model some extra objects, but because the macehead took so long, coupled with the fact that many other Lough Gur objects are of much more unusual shape, made me stick to just one. In a larger scale production I would definitely model more - I would have liked to have the shield done. I tried to get the texturing sorted as well, but to no avail as yet. I think the key is to obtain full functionality at the moment, and to worry about the rest later.

I do also have a first person controller in this scene, but I need to add colliders to the objects to prevent the FPC walking where it shouldn't be walking, and I also need to animate the macehead and add the webpage with all its information.

More Unity

I'm exploring the use of scripting in Unity which has proved really helpful. What I'm doing is JavaScript based, which is great because we did it last semester so I've a head start on the understanding of it. It has been quite straightforward so far. As well as that, I've been able to create scenes with controllers that I can navigate with. Unity has a lot of templates for outdoor terrains, but unfortunately none for indoor terrains so I will have to model those in 3ds Max. I've really been enjoying working with Unity so far. Simple commands can have really cool effects.

 

Unity experiments

I'm currently trying to open a webpage from a Unity game with a click of the mouse using the Application.OpenURL function, but it's not working just yet. I've been playing around with Unity a bit more and it's very interesting to see the possibilities of the software. Here is a scene of a terrain I created and textured. The inbuilt presets in Unity are very handy and there are also options to import others.

 

Unity

Getting to know Unity at the moment, and working my way through the Lynda.com tutorials. The interface is much different to 3DS Max and Maya, but a lot of the controls are the same, which is useful. Really looking forward to exploring the possibilities here :)

I have some sketches made for the design of my museum itself, I will scan them in soon. It's been tough to figure out the architecture, but interesting nonetheless.