05/15/03: Progress Report #11

Plan

Mr. Latimer recently asked me to modify my program to have screengrabs of other people's Senior Tech Lab projects, so that's the plan for this iteration.  Basically, I'm going to have screengrabs in place of exhibits and when the user clicks on them, the program will open a mozilla browser to that person's tech lab website.

The other thing is to add some more exhibits.  The plan is to have 3 more exhibits (videos and pictures) up in the museum.

Design

I actually had a little bit of trouble with this iteration, but first let me talk about all the stuff I got to cut out! =) As I was modifying code for this iteration, I kept on thinking, "Wow, I wish I had done this first!" because it was just one long hallway, so I didn't have to figure out a way to get the exhibits to go in their correct rooms and all that.  I just ended up deleting half of my functions and all that.

The part that caused the most trouble was modifying the mouse function to open a mozilla browser to the tech lab website.  The reason why was that the websites were all based on names, which don't have the same number of characters.  For example, Turpyn's site's url is http://www.tjhsst.edu/~mturpyn/techlab, while Jing's url is http://www.tjhsst.edu/~jchan1/techlab.  And mine's even shorter: http://www.tjhsst.edu/~lpham/techlab.  So as you can see, I had a slight bit of trouble getting the varying number of characters in the url's to be called correctly in the program, but it worked out...I just had an array that could hold the greatest possible number of characters and put the end-of-file character whenever it ended--it worked.

Coding

Download the code for this iteration: report10-museum.cpp

This iteration of the code requires textures and text files to run.  These files can be found here.

Testing

Although I only managed to add one exhibit, I did decide how I wanted to organize the technology section in order to add this one exhibit: the Wright brothers' flight.  You can see the new blueprints here.

I did, however, meet my main goal for this iteration--connecting the exhibits to their correct videos.  I don't have a way of proving this, but I definitely have been showing this to everybody who walks by, so I'm sure you've seen it.