"Speaking Points"

The subject of this blog is about this thing called "Speaking Points," and in particular, speaking points in relation to Project Darkstar. So far, we've spent most of our time researching and learning, but we've also done our fair share of production in the past week and a half. So far, we've nailed down our out-of-the-box experience to be a culmination of 3 things: An installer, a game/game-framework, and a series of tutorials.

The idea of an installer was not obvious to us from the start. When we first made our way to Sun, we were expecting to sit down, load up Darkstar, and immediately crank out the greatest game framework in 7 weeks with the most in-depth tutorials possible. However, in life, the devil is in the details, and the details of how to get Darkstar up and running were not easy to track down. Our first experience with Darkstar was that it was cumbersome to use and information on how to intially get it up and running was either outdated or nonexistant. Fortunately, we work with the guys who are making it, and their expertise was invaluable to learning how to set it up initially. As well, we were able to track down some minor issues with the loading process that only affect a small number of PCs, but in the end we were able to understand how to use the system. Still, for a newcomer, it wouldn't be surprising for them to turn away based on how intimidating it may be. In reality, its not bad at all. But, for us to say that this was a successful OOBE, every second has to be streamlined. So, our team came up with the idea of an installer, which the Darkstar team was all for. In the end, there will be both a GUI and shell version of the installer. What Chris ended up doing was writing a front-end installer framework, and what I've done is written an installer back-end framework. The goal is that making changes to the backend will only require a minor update in both front-ends, so the change is reflected in both views. Fortunately, most of the that is complete. I predict about another day and a half of work to get both the GUI installer and shell installer complete. We still have to write test-cases though - those might be tricky in our system, since there is a lot of file movement, and simulating that can be difficult unless properly done.

The two other parts of the project are the actual game as well as tutorials that go along with the game. I will touch upon those in my next blog post.