http://hvwc.cdh.ucla.edu/moving-stage,
http://hvwc.cdh.ucla.edu/moving-arena, and
http://hvwc.cdh.ucla.edu/performance-ephemeral-stage-20
Between Summer 2015 and Summer 2016, I worked on three related portions of the RomeLab project. For most of the Roman Republic, there were no permanent stages or arenas for performance within the city. Instead, temporary structures would be built in the Roman Forum for performances and games. Since no remains of these structures exist, their location within the Forum is unknown. Two of these portions of the RomeLab project allow users to position a stage or arena wherever they would like in the Roman Forum to examine the implications of their theories. Additionally, they make use of the multiplayer compatibility within Unity to share the placement of the stage or arena with all users viewing the Unity environment at the time. Finally, the third portion makes a visual argument about the Roman Arena’s model based on sightlines throughout the city.
For this project, I debugged the existing C# codebase within Unity and implemented a feature allowing the stage or arena to be controlled by one user at a time while sharing its location with all users simultaneously. The implementation that I used to ensure this process happens correctly resembles that of locks found in Computer Science. This involved the use of a complex algorithm normally applied to a different area of the field.
I also expanded a portion of the codebase to allow buildings to be toggled on or off. Because the evidence for the Roman Forum during the Republican period is not always certain, there is debate about when certain buildings were constructed. The code that I expanded allows users to view the space with any possible combination of the uncertain buildings, displaying only those that they believe were present in the 3rd century BCE.
Additionally, I implemented code that moves the user throughout the Unity virtual world as they progress through narratives housed within the Drupal website in which the Unity is embedded. Although a preliminary version of this was present in the codebase that I inherited, I identified several bugs that prevented it from working and replaced the code with my own.
Skills: Unity, 3D World Integration, Drupal, Programming (C#, Algorithms)