Project Wonderland and Sun Spots

Yesterday, I was able to watch a wonderful presentation about Project Wonderland, a project which I think has a bright future and has some extremely interesting features. I did not write about it while watching the presentation since I was admittedly captivated and wanted to absorb as much as I could about the technology - it was definitely something I could see myself using down the road.

Project Wonderland is a framework for developing online worlds - and Sun is doing some really neat stuff with it. One of the big features in the release I was shown was the use of sound. In the game, sound is sent out radially to simulate how sound works in the real world, and as well there are 'cones of silence' where only users within the cone of silence can hear the sound. As well, they have a neat "cell" system where people can easily create their own sections of the world, as well as things in the world.

Today, we were also given a pair of Sun Spots to play around. These things have a really awesome out-of-the-box experience, in which the default program loaded onto them is a bouncing ball demo, that can communicate with any other Sun Spots it detects and bounce its ball over to them. It has to be seen to be understood, but its pretty damn impressive. Also, fooling around with the Sun Spot is pretty trivial - you load a program to communicate with it, write your program, and in your Sun Spots NetBeans project, right click and tell it to deploy. Very cool.

My First Day

As my first post in regards to my Sun Microsystems MQP, I'll state my reasons for having this:

• Keep track of what I've done
  
• Keep track of what needs to be done.
• Give updates as to the status of the Darkstar project and what I'm doing.
• Write about things I discover about Darkstar that someone might find useful.
  

My group consists of my friends Chris Scalabrini and Rob Martin and myself. We're in the process of trying to figure out some cool "out-of-the-box" experience to make for Darkstar. For research purposes, Rob and Chris are forcing me to play World of Warcraft, Dark Age of Camelot, and other MMO games. Normally, I would not touch these games (and so far I've found WoW to be as boring as I imagined) but I need to learn more about MMOs so I can start coming up with ideas of how to take MMOs to the next level. I have some ideas I'm planning on developing in the future, but I need an idea that can be implemented in 7 weeks.

The tasks assigned to me today are the following:

• Measure success - what are the problems I'm trying to solve, and how am I going about it.
• Write documentation! I will have to develop a report and presentation for the team and myself.
  
  • Team Documentation - we have to work together to get this done.
  • Personal Documentation - write about what I've been working on.
• Gather references.
• Write weekly goals, and meet them.
  
• Research!

Fortunately, my team kicks ass so meeting these goals should be mostly going through the motions. We're all really bright guys so our biggest challenge is going to be setting realistic goals to ourselves, as well as goals that make the guys we're working with happy. I'm actually looking forward to pitching my project, since I'm sure that whatever we come up with will be both interesting and cool, and this will be the place to go to keep track of any of the cool things that happen.