Cheers everyone ! I am fairly new at teamwork. I am a programmer, but somehow i ended up with a programming team on my back, and they keep asking me what thay should be doing to complete our project before our time limit is up ! The problem is, i keep telling them stuff like: "Sorry, guys. I don't really know myself.. I figure you guys shoud be doing something usefull " In other words i'm stuck And i need professional help, from anyone who have any good tips on "How to be a good Lead Designer, Programmer, whatever... Our project is a multimedia presentation about our city. We have 100 MegaBytes to do this, so we choose to create a 3D engine in Visual Basic with DirectX. We are a team of 8 people. - 3 ppl Programmers (myself included) - 2 ppl Writers and project researchers - 1 ppl Musician & Sound artist and finally - 2 ppl 3D artists to create the graphics. And i am stuck with both programming and supervising everyone else. Please help out if you can ! Every post might help ! Byez, Robert

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"Find the path, follow the Master... Follow the master, understand the master... Overcome the master !" [edited by - Dark_Guy on January 21, 2003 3:19:40 AM]

So, are you planning on making like a 3d walk around inside the landmarks thing, or perhaps a drive around model of the city? The only advice I can give to this general info is a very general "Decide what you want to do, and figure out what you would need to be able to do it, and use your skills to create those things you would need." Not very helpful I''m afraid.

*Only in darkness can one truely shine*

Yes ! We are trying to do a walking/flying around a model of our city.
Yeah, but i am suppose to tell programmers what they should do, and i do not have the experience for it :\
Anyway i don''t really know how to organise our work...
I tried to gather everyone up, so we could talk over what we are suppose to do, but it is verry ineficient this way...
Oh well...i think i should do all the thinking
I must say it''s a lot easyer to be just a programmer :\

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"Find the path, follow the Master... Follow the master, understand the master... Overcome the master !"

Break the project up into sections. One person focus on getting the city loading, etc done, one person work on doing the display code (rendering objects, etc), and another person to work on the camera movements model. This would give all 3 programmers something to do, while they aren't waiting on each other to finish stuff. Just make sure they will work together, so the Display code can use the camera model to move around, and can also display the models that were loaded. After you have this setup, you can basically let each person do their thing, and then merge them together once they're done, and you've got a completed engine. If everyone works efficiently, the actual programming shouldn't take more than a week. (I could write something this simple in a day by myself, so I figure 3 people shouldn't take to long as long as you can stay coordinated).

Billy - Ready4Dis@aol.com

[edited by - Ready4Dis on January 21, 2003 11:46:47 AM]

why dont u find someone to organize all this stuff for u. And u better do it soon, cause all ur peoples might lose interest in the project

Ugh, trust me, four years of college have left me well acquainted of the difficulty with group projects...

Okay, did anyone read the long Email I sent last week on our project?
*crickets chirp*
Okay, okay... Well, that''s fine; does anyone have any thoughts on the design at all? I can explain what I''ve got if you want.
*tumbleweed*
... Okay, is anyone listening to me talk right now?
*more crickets*

My best advice is to try to split the project up into smaller pieces that you can assign people to- if you can hand out prototypes for objects and say "Okay, I want this object to have these functions, which do this", then it''ll be pretty helpful- gives them a good idea of what they should be doing and all.

The sad side-note to this is that, as the group''s leader, you''re probably going to do a significant portion of the work anyway, but hopefully it''ll be worth it.

Good luck- leading a group is tough. Believe me, I know.

- HC

-- EMail: cloweh@rpi.edu
-- AIM: SeigfriedH

Thanks people for all your posts

OK ! Next question:

I have split up the project, but unfortunatly i am heaving a hard time determening what the programmers should do...
Unfortunatly I am the best programmer, and have most of the knowledge about DirectX.
However i only code in Visual Basic, and I am not yet confortable with C++.
The second programmer has good knowledge on VisualBasic too, but he only had some experience with Direct Draw, and some basic Direct3D...
The third programmer only codes in C++, and has no knowledge on VB. He knows OpenGL, and has few experience with DirectX.
This way it is verry hard to determine how to break the Project for programmers...

I tried it this way:
- I, the leader would take on with the writing of the 3D Engine
- I''ve assigned to the other VB guy to create the MenuSystem and a writing of a browsing engine, to walk around menus and stuff
- But i have no idea what to assign to the third one, who has absolutly NO Knowledge on VisualBasic...

Help is needed :\

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"Find the path, follow the Master... Follow the master, understand the master... Overcome the master !"

If you're comfortable with COM, then have the third code all of your AI and wrap it in a DLL, if you dont have any AI just think of another component that you need and have him wrap that in a DLL, the speed advantage of Cpp will be negated by the COM calls but should balance out to roughly the same speed as your native VB code. Or if you really want to do the guy a favor, suggest that he learn VB, it's great for writting tools and RAD development of Databases. If the guy is a competent Cpp coder VB will be like candy to him.

** Just wanted to add, im not flaming VB, i love the stuff.

[edited by - Dreddnafious Maelstrom on January 23, 2003 12:18:27 PM]

maybe you should get a new team...

it''s your first team work and then you have such a big team??

i''m working at my first team project right now and we are 2(sometimes 3 because our sound guy isn''t really a member of the team and he doesn''t want to be 2)

me for coding and a friend for graphics...and it works wonderful.

i also prefer being the only programmer in a team, because nobody (excapt me) understands my code ... ok, i dont use many comments or something like this cause it''t MY code. i gotta understand it, nobody else