The Persuit of PaperKing - Days 14-18 - Final Stretch

The deadline was extended until today, giving all the contestants a couple extra days.  We greatly needed the time to finish.
Building the tracks continued to be a difficult endeavor for us.  Having to refresh ourselves on high-school trig consumed some time.  After fighting and having to constantly convert between radians and degrees I now understand how even the government could loose their items.
We ended up having to create multiple groups of code for specific functions, instead of being able to just work with simple function calls.  This development process was tedious and tricky as any simple changes needed had to be duplicated in multiple places.
I feel fortunate that I work with some great developers.  Our Graphic Designer, Orion, in particular completely re-worked the UI today, and it looks great.  He managed to tie together a bunch of different display controls, a virtual 3d environment, and then topped it off with a great logo as he was walking out the door.
We were struggled until the last couple days on what kind of interface mechanism to use to manipulate the track height.  The problem is that computer mice are 2d, and trying to work in a 3d environment is non-intuitive.  We finally got to a good solution by strarting back at the begining (of the track).  As we looked at how to add track, it became pretty obvious that the tracks are connected (obviously).   That meant for us that the height and location of the track had a good boost, it was next to the previous.  You just had to decide if it was going to go left, right or straight.  We then had to figure out how to mange the height.  We decided on "flattening" out the 3d track and showing it from start to finish in a linear manner.  This way it is easy to see if the track is going up or down at any given point, without having to manipulate the entire world.
The next hurdle, was to determine how to edit the track.  How do you edit the middle of the track, since anything but a change in height will then end up turning the who track around.  We decided the easiest was to just delete the track from the end up to the point that you want to change.  This doesn't seem like an elegant solution, however it really does work well.
The project was good, it is complete enough for now.  Unfortunately the project didn't get to far on the requirements list from the beginning.  To finish those pieces would be fairly simplistic, we just got bogged down on the physics and geometry of the track all the way to the end.