Work, work...

So it's been a while since I last posted anything in here so I'll recap what I've been working on these last couple weeks.

First I spent a lot of time setting up the working area we were given (the game lab at Sun) with several different machines with varying operating systems. As of right now we have a couple Windows machines running XP, a PowerPC Mac with OSX, and a couple Linux machines with Ubuntu. I also attempted to get Solaris on one of the Linux machines but the install requires a root password which apparently niether myself nor the Sun people here know. Oh well. Basically the idea behind the various machines is so we can quickly test our code in multiple environments, which we have done already, but I'll get to that in a second. Once these were set up I also set out to get required software and stuff running such as Java and the Project Darkstar tutorials. I also spent some time looking at the darkstar forums and blog posts. That was pretty much the first week. This past week my focus changed over to the jMonkeyEngine. Several Sun reps have spoken about the ease of use of jME and so at this point we have basically decided to use it for our project. This week I've been looking into this and doing a bunch of tutorials and things.

So here's what we plan on accomplishing while we're here. There are three basic parts. First, after much frustration our first day trying to get Darkstar up and running we decided to implement an installer program that will eliminate some of the hassle of setting up the Darkstar (and third-party depedencies) binaries. Most of this work was done the first week and the past two days by my cohorts, although I got eclipse installed on several machines and downloaded and tested the GUI portion of the installer. Second, we hope to complete some out-of-the-box game to showcase the potential of the Darkstar engine, of which we are just about to begin working on (other than me playing around with jME or lots of brainstorming and talking with Jim). The final portion will most likely be developed alongside part two, and that's a tutorial system to allow new users to get familiar with the Darkstar API. Right now our idea is to take a very simple game and have the user "develop" it iteratvely, using some of our code as a base and our tutorial as a guide. This will get the user into the code immediately but also produce some flahsy and fun in a relatively quick and painless process.

And I think that's about it for now. All of us are thinking that we'll start posting in the blogs more often, like Mon. Wed. Fri. or something like that. Hopefully it'll work out :p
More to come later...