Capstone Update 19: Project Statistics

It's been a few weeks since my last capstone post, and quite a lot has happened! Last week we finished The Last Light and presented it at the senior show, and it got a pretty great reaction all around. Even better, the game got several Let's Plays after we put it up on itch.io, and the overall reaction seems to be pretty good.

By the way, you can download the game here:

(Sadly, it's Windows only right now. I might see if I can put a Linux build together at some point though)

Now that the dust has settled, I thought it might be a good time to go over some statistics from the project. I got a few requests from fellow team members, and also wanted to do some things myself, so here we go:
(Please keep in mind that these numbers are estimates pulled from hastily-constructed git queries. They should be close to the right number, but may not be perfect)

Total Number of Merge Conflicts

When dealing with teams that have more than a couple of members, it's only natural that at some point, merge conflicts are going to happen. This problem becomes even more common when your project consists mostly of binary files that can't be merged normally. We certainly had our fair share with 122 merge conflicts resolved.

Floor_400x400

For some reason, a random unused asset from the UE4 starter content folder, Floor_400x400.uasset, kept getting marked as changed. My team was curious how many times it got 'updated' in git. Apparently, 60 times. That's about once every other day!

Substance Plugin Kill Counter

Unreal really loves the Substance plugin. If your machine has it installed, Unreal has a habit of quietly slipping it into your project when you're not looking. Then, everyone else on your team gets a little popup saying something along the lines of
"This project requires the Substance plugin. Do you want to download it now?"
Naturally, this message is a tad irritating, so we tended to go into the project file and purge the plugin. We did this 34 times, in fact. That number actually seems remarkably low, but I think it's because we didn't always remove the plugin immediately if we were busy, so sometimes it would stick around for a while.

Total Number of Binary Updates

Have you ever an artist to go compile some code? It's not pretty. Although Unreal makes compiles pretty easy, we programmers made a point to include the compiled binaries in git so that our fellow team members could spend less time compiling and more time developing. This happened 96 times.


That's it, but hang on to your seats, boys and girls! It's time for.....

Uncle Huey's Repo Analysis Awards

The "Biggest Git" Award for Total Commits

 Let's start with a simple one: Who made the most commits overall? It was a close race, but the winner is:
Chris Johnson, with 292 commits
Second place is Vincent Loignon, with 288 commits. 
Simple, right? On to the next category!

The "Man of Mystery" Award for Commits under an Alias

Not everyone keeps to a single name, especially when jumping from computer to computer. This award is for the person who made the most commits under a non-name:
Jesse McKinley, with 122 commits listed as 'Dekeche'
Second place is Hugues Ross (me), with 121 commits listed as 'DF458'
Looks like it's another close one. Next!

The "Fashionably Late" Award for Latest First Commit

You know what they say: The early bird is a total loser.  This award goes to the person who was the last to start making commits to the repo. Who won? Why, it was:
Paul Scardera, who first committed on April 13th
Second place is Kyle Patterson, who began on April 8th
I think it's important to mention that these awards are meant to be fun, and that this isn't any sort of condemnation. Paul and Kyle are both producers, so they only joined in with direct development at the end to help with 11th-hour grunt work. They've been super helpful throughout the project, just not with commits.
And speaking of strange awards...

The "Writing is for Losers" Award for Most Commits Without Changing a Single Line of Text

Git keeps track of how many lines of text were added, removed, or changed in text files. This award goes to the developer who made the most commits while maintaining a perfect 0 in all of those categories. Let's hear it for:
Paul Scardera, with 7 commits and 0 lines
Second place is Scott Beecher, with 6 commits and 0 lines
Again, be nice, not everyone's work is represented by commits, yada yada.
Now, time for the final award:

The "Who's That Pokemon" Award for Most Enigmatic Team Member

Among the huddled masses of our Slack channel, there are rumors of a secret developer, spoken of only in hushed tones, working from the shadows. Who are they? Where did they come from? No-one knows for sure. Of course, I'm talking about:
Unknown, with 18 commits
Yeah, so someone probably just forgot to enter their name into git before committing. Still, it's good to have fun with these things, that's what the awards are for!
Actually, I just double-checked and apparently it was me all along (with one commit from vince). Whoops!

Project Development Visualization

All this text is pretty boring. Thankfully, I have a solution to that problem. In addition to all of these stats, I also have a visualization of the project's development, starting from February (Fullscreen viewing is recommended):


This video was made with a super-cool tool called gource. Go check it out!