March 2024 Update

March 2024 Update

Alex Dumouchelle

March, 31 2024

Feature Update

What you can do as a drill writer in OpenMarch.


Development Update

Details about the development process.


What’s changed?

March was all about putting in the groundwork for making future feature implementation easier. As new features and classes are built, I’m doing my best to test as I go. My goal has been to be much more class-based, and that has been working out really well.

New UI Features

  • More mature animation
    • Stopping the animation is not glitchy.
  • Pathways to the previous/next dot.
    • These can be toggled on and off

Development Improvements

  • All actions/keyboard shortcuts are stored in one place
    • Maybe this is a bad thing to do? But, this will make searching for actions easy (like you can do in VSCode)
    • Creating new actions and keyboard shortcuts is very easy
  • Field Properties are now more generalized
    • xCheckpoints rather than yard lines, yCheckpoints rather than hashes
    • This is planning ahead for supporting more than just football fields (indoor floors, stages)
  • Updating marcher’s coordinates on the canvas is so much easier
    • Static functions in the CanvasMarcher class

Goals accomplished this month

Must haves -

  • Complete unit tests
  • Integration tests for most things
  • Class based objects. Less interfaces in inappropriate spots

Nice to haves (basically the same from last month) -

  • Complete animation features (kind of)
  • Show marchers from prev page
  • Show pathways to prev page
  • Snap to yard line or hash
  • Find a better default location for marchers?
  • Evenly distribute marchers function

Plans for April

My priorities change for this every week. I really need to build integration tests, yet I still have not built a single one. Constant procrastination.

Must haves -

  • Complete unit tests (still)
  • Integration tests for most things (still)
    • Especially interacting with the canvas
  • Batch alignment
    • Distribute evenly vertically and horizontally
    • Align vertically and horizontally
    • Snap to yard line

Nice to haves (basically the same from last month) -

  • Find a better default location for marchers?
  • Start shape creation?
  • Music??

Remember, you can always check the GitHub project to see what current issues are in the queue.