The "Experience"

As this project has progressed, our overall goal has become clearer - this "out-of-the-box" experience is not some tech demo, nor is it some cool game that people can play and say "This is really awesome." Our project is simply a quick introduction to Project Darkstar, how the technologies help developers, and what it can be put to work on, namely powering the server side of massively-multiplayer games. Having a user create a full fledged massively-multiplayer game is way out of the scope of this tutorial - many large companies take a crack at it and find themselves failing epicly while trying to make one. So we have to scale the scope of the OOTBE to be compact, quick, and informative. Fortunately, there is this great open-source project at Sun called Project Snowman that is exactly what we're looking for - its a 3rd person capture-the-flag style shooter where players fight each other as snowmen on a snowy tundra. Fortunately, the code base is pretty solid - with a little bit of digging I was able to find where Entity updates were handled, how messages were parsed, and how players communicated with each other, among other things. By "tutorializing" Project Snowman, hopefully we can give developers a fun and information introduction to the Project Darkstar technologies so that they can go ahead and use Project Darkstar on their own personal endeavors.

While I did mention Project Snowman last week, we were not exactly sure if we were going to use it. We were told that the code was not good - from the looks of it, the only thing lacking is great documentation. The code itself is written in a fine manner, and while it might be good to tweak it, its not so bad that we will be spending our time doing that, since there are far more important matters at hand. The key thing here is that developers have a good first experience with Project Darkstar - first impressions are lasting impressions, and if we want to get more people using it then they have to have a good first impression of the technology. We believe that we can achieve this goal, but it's not going to be easy.