Week 14 - working progress 2

I have finished the laying furnitures and artworks (I built panels in 3Dstudio max + found images + applied mapping) in the building while stacey was working on the lighting yesterday. After combining the lighting and the building/objects together, I found that the buliding was out of scale, and I couldn't scale the whole thing up all at once. Therefore Stacey had to redo the lighting, and I had to redo the rest.

After rescaling the building, I learned how to import sound, and how to cook the map. Tried to add physics to furnitures so that they are movable, however nor the texture on furnitures shows up or furnitures are movable (I tried many different ways - change different collision settings, add interpactor and then conver to Kactor, add interpactor and then add trigger...).

I wished I had more time to play around with these collision stuff but running out of time :( :(

Week 14 - working progress

Today I have been copying and pasting the terrain and sky from the file that I made previously to our final ut3 file. I could not add player-start at the beginning. That was because I created the level with additive geometry style. After subtracting the geometry, I got it to work! Now I am trying to import all the furnitures and some educational equipments to make the model look like a school! I will add triggers in those small pieces if I have time.

Week 13 - working progress

Hi everyone in group 3,

Just want to make things more clear here.

I have already re-imported the whole buidling and re-applied textures. While I am waiting for your work, I will be doing the soundscape tutorials.

We are meeting 12pm on Sunday. Once again, please get some work done before we meet up. I must collect you work from you by the end of the day(sunday 15 june), and finalize everything by monday night (we can't leave everything last minute). After Sunday, I will not be collecting anything from you because it takes time to combine all the work together and upload.

You are welcome to tell me what and how to improve the combined work after I finish combining everything, but the first thing is, you have to work through tht tutorials and know exactly how it works. As I have said for a million times, in order to get to know UT3, you really need to spend some time trying, get a file to test. It won't help to just sit there and watch the video / tutorial. Again, please do not ask me what to do, because it's OUR project, not my own project. And it is pointless to ask that if you never follow what I tell or you do not meet the requirement.

Sorry for being tough. Only a few days to go, and then we go on holiday! Good luck.

Andrea

Week 12 - Working progress

I have been spending many hours in the labs at uni working on UT3, and have been seeing other students working on their assignments as well. I noticed, those teams who are collaborating and working together have a more developed model than my team. I feel, even though I am spending the same amount of time on the fabrication project as other members in different teams, I don’t feel that this will pay off in the end because up until now, it has only been 2 people working in my team compared to 5 people working together in other teams.

Today I have been working on the terrain. It is so good to have Danielle in the lab today. We helped each other a lot when we got stuck on minor things. 10 days to go guys! Keep it up!

Week 11 - Conflict

“The rule of the game: learn everything, read everything, inquire into everything…When two texts, or two assertions, or perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather that cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is complex” [1], wrote Marguerite Yourcenar.

General dynamics of conflict spirals to the specific dynamics of conflict in organizations:

Vertical conflict – occurs between hierarchical levels

Horizontal conflict – occurs between people working at the same hierarchical level within an organization

Staff-line conflict – occurs between people performing different types of tasks.

Role conflict – occurs when misunderstandings arise over just what it is that person meant to be doing

Resource scarcity – when organizational resources are scarce, conflict will occur as surely as animals will fight over scarce food

Work flow interdependence – all sections benefit from the efficiencies of other sections, but are vulnerable to and suffer from the inefficiencies of others.

Power and value asymmetry – occurs when a people holding radically different values are required to work together

Goal incompatibility – When specific goals of differing departments sections and divisions of the one organization clash[2]

As I stated in our previous presentation, the existence of conflict can be seen as a context of our collaboration project. Different attitudes toward the goal, difference in knowledge, the unclear identification of individual’s roll, cultural difference, and misunderstanding in communication are the main factors which result conflicts within our group.

There are a number of approaches to manage conflicts. They include:
- Negotiation
- Interpersonal skills
- Cultural and gender differences
- Group dynamics
- Contact and communication
- Super-ordinate goals
- Tit for that
- De-escalation thresholds
- Apology
- Forgiveness
- Praise
- Sacrifice
- New resources
- Decoupling and buffering
- Formal authority
- Planning
- Scale
- Stalemates
- Compromise
- Mediation

Communication analyst Jon Warner has developed a model of negotiation styles base on empathy and energy; each style has strengths as well as weaknesses:

Pushy bullying – loudly commands attention on a key point and draws negotiations to a rapid close, yet may adopt a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude

Confident promoting – quickly focuses on the major issues, wins people over with enthusiasm, and usually adapts flexibility to reach a deal, but can be too aggressive or fail to listen fully

Quietly manipulating – quickly draws attention to real threats to agreement and can subtly focus a debate, but may distort information or exploit other party’s weakness openly

Carefully suggestion – keeps the negotiation calm, good at drawing attention to the deeper issues, yet can fail to commit to convincing the other side

Conflicts normally strike people as being unpleasant and stressful, they can lead to:
- Negative emotions
- Blocked communication
- Increased coordination between people who have to work and live together
- A shift towards autocratic leadership when discussion-based decision making breaks down
- Reduced ability to view other perspectives and breakdown in empathy and vision

However, conflicts can sometimes produce positive payoffs:
- Pressure and frustrations are released
- New perspectives and information can be gathered about the other side
- New perspectives can be gained about our side
- Better decision making and problem solving can take place
- Cohesiveness can increase
- Complacency can be challenged
- Change can take place
- Differences can be appreciated
- Intrapersonal conflicts can be resolved

----------------------------------------------

Reference:

[1] Cloke Goldsmith, John Wiley & Sons, Inc 2000, Resolving conflicts at work
[2] Baden Eunson, John Wiley & Sons Australia 2007, Conflict Management

Week 11 - working progress

The past few days was quite tough for me because I have got another two big assignments due, but I still have to fix up the problem for the fabrication project so that our whole group can move on. After getting help from Russell, I fixed up the scale of the model, broke the whole model into parts in a logical way, applied texture and a bit of lighting, added a few game players, changed the setting of collision, created the terrain and the skydome. Apart from the texture (which does not come up the way that I want), everything is going pretty well now!

Week 10 - Reflection on this course (Part1)

I think it is time for me to start reflecting on what I have learned within this course. Basically I divide it into two main aspects - technical skills and collaborative skills.

I realised that we learn things from experience and mistakes. I was stressed that I was driven to delicate so much time learning every single sofeware that we need to use in this course, but the outcome of that is, I did learn a lot.

Because Liming and I live nearby, we meet up together to do work quite often. The way we do things together is a bit interesting, but it works - I am the person who researches for, works through all the tutorials, and trying out errors in unfamilar softwares (such as how to do screen capturing by using captivate and fraps; how to export files from director to premiere / edit videos in premiere; how to upload videos on Youtube; how to embed the link in WIKI; modelling and texture importing in ut3; terrain; lighting; surrounding ect), while Liming is working the softwares that she has already known (such as Movie Maker, Director, 3Ds MAX). I always make sure that my "updated" knowledge is available to Liming so that we can proceed the task smoothly. For exmaple, everytime when Liming is up to a stage that she need some more knowledge to continue working on the task, she either passes me the task or learns that knowledge from me. By sitting together and finding solutions, I found that to work with others actually provides me an opportunity to learn from others' strengths, and it gives more options in decision-making.

In order to approach a given task, there are lots of ways of doing that. To start off the project, I looked for different tools for our group communications (to save our some time for meeting up face to face), such as msn and basecamp. I was not nominated as a team leader in the beginning, however I am sort of picking up the responsibilities of a team leader since we do need some sort of hierarchy to make the group running in on a track. They include: orgainising group meetings, allocating and checking individual's tasks each week; taking meeting minutes; giving help and providing advices for each team members ect. By allocating tasks for our group members very week, I found that we need to make our planning realistic, but at the same time, as an orgainising person, I need to move the dead line a bit forward to allow some errors happenning. I think it is a good idea to keep a record of our process, so that we can aways track back to what happened and that provides evidents, which can reduce unecessary argument.I think as a group, we should all learn the lesson from not having any planning right from the beginning. It is essential for a group to set a common goal because that indicates how much efford we would like to put into this project. Secondly, time management is very important within a group working environment. We need to do things that we are committed to do for each week, otherwise, tasks will be accumulated, and it only makes the coming days tougher.

The theme for our next presentation is conflict. As I have mentioned in the previous presentation, our group is working in a context of the existance of conflict. It is indeed a challenging topic for me to study due to the fact that each of us confront a lot of conflicts in this group project. I am going to explaning more about what I have learned from conflict management a bit more.