I'm in charge of maintaining the project website for our group. I'm using iWeb, which makes things relatively nice. Our only real problem along these lines has been some issues with video file formats across multiple platforms/codecs. This week we collectively decided to only use Quicktime format (.mov) from now on, because it seems to work the best for everybody.
In terms of technical progress, I'm still working on the fly swarming script. I have a MEL script that creates a locator and randomly distributes some "flies" around it, and an animation expression that controls their basic physics (updates acceleration based on the constraints mentioned in my previous post, updates velocity according to this acceleration, updates position based on this updated velocity). It isn't producing good-looking results just yet (I'll post a video as soon as it is), but my only real problem along these lines has been the actual syntax of the language.
I'm familiar with several scripting languages, ranging from the basics like Perl and VBScript to software-specific behemoths like Matlab and LotusScript...but I've never encountered a scripting language as unpredictable as Maya's. It's still essentially a guessing game for me whether or not an expression needs to be backquoted, or whether or not it is safe to use the return value of some function inside another command, etc.
One quirk that I had to overcome is that, unlike most other scripting languages, you don't interact with MEL in a REPL. It doesn't really "print" the results of your commands unless you wrap everything in a "print" command. This is crucial for debugging. Much of my coding time thus far has been spent climbing such cliffs in the learning curve. Thankfully, I now feel relatively proficient and hope to do some more procedural tasks in the near future.
Other upcoming work I'm planning on doing includes adding some 2D textures to the walls of our house and also refining the model for our car.
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