The stress of scheduling

The Schedule this week has been an interesting task it so far has taken me almost 2 days to finish up the scheduling for 4 weeks of programmer tasks. The tasks are to start creating the TDD once we get back from our holiday period, at this stage I have scheduled in 3 prototypes over 4 days, the prototypes are creating pathfinding with a changing environment, Polygon and Bone limitation test on Gamebryo with testing into bone LOD's and testing Raknet and PhysX components between two networked computers.
We should have enough resources on all prototypes to make sure that we gain insight into the difficulty of these technical challenges. The only prototype not yet being tested which may be of importance to us is shader testing, but I believe I have left enough time during the documentation stage of our pre-production to make sure that the algorithms, references and some sample shader code should be able to be documented.

The shaders we are looking at atm are:
- Edges on objects
- Darker Distance draws for artistic silhouettes
- Vignette shading
- Camera effect - head bob
- Muzzle Flash
- Tracer Rounds - unsure if this is the best method so any replies as to other methods would be appreciated.
- Alpha-blended camera transitions
- Vert extrusion and alpha/coloring for shield effect

The base mechanics for how we wish to balance the spawning of characters, weapons and resources has been discussed and a tree based, random points system will be used to control the release of higher end wave weapon releases.

Looking foward to moving past scheduling and into prototyping but its almost complete and 5 minutes now should save an hour later so its good to have it almost done and available for the team to reference.

Happy holidays to all.