Help with a Software Project?
Discussion
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you'll feel much better!Java is fecking horrible. Yes it's worth knowing because it's pretty much the default middleware language choice for many industries requiring multi-tier web delivery apps, but that doesn't make it nice.
However if you want to get shit done fast, and elegantly, then take a look at Ruby. It's absolutely gorgeous.
Anyway before this turns into a programming language religious war, back to the OP - an idea for a software project???
Well did you ever play the game 'Elite' ???? How about a multiplayer version of that. Braben the lazy bugger hasn't bothered to follow up with the game that all us old gits want, which is a proper internet multiplayer version.
You'd need some architecture that'd support players dropping in and out of the game (the game makes this easy - don't let anyone 'log off' unless they've docked at a space station or planet spaceport), plus the provision for robot players if there aren't any people in the chosen star system (otherwise it'd get a bit boring).
You could do the graphics very simply but design it so the detail / drawing is extensible (use OpenGL?) - you don't need to make it pretty for the project, just make it work. Wireframe would be good enough as a proof of concept.
Loads of people have done their own versions of Elite (check out Oolite for an object oriented version, I think that one's in Objective-C) so the basics of the game mechanics are well understood.
But a client-server architecture that can support multiple players in the same star system and also scale up to loads of players across multiple star systems - that'd be a nice architectural challenge, given that you'd need to account for network effects from the low level (latency, ping, etc.) all the way up to game level (system consistency, etc.). A lot of this work has already been done with multiplayer games all the way back to Doom days, but nobody AFAICT has done Elite properly.
Presumably Braben is a tight fecker who won't let anyone do it commercially, and he's got no inclination of doing it himself. But as a uni opensource software project, it'd be a good starting point
However if you want to get shit done fast, and elegantly, then take a look at Ruby. It's absolutely gorgeous.
Anyway before this turns into a programming language religious war, back to the OP - an idea for a software project???
Well did you ever play the game 'Elite' ???? How about a multiplayer version of that. Braben the lazy bugger hasn't bothered to follow up with the game that all us old gits want, which is a proper internet multiplayer version.
You'd need some architecture that'd support players dropping in and out of the game (the game makes this easy - don't let anyone 'log off' unless they've docked at a space station or planet spaceport), plus the provision for robot players if there aren't any people in the chosen star system (otherwise it'd get a bit boring).
You could do the graphics very simply but design it so the detail / drawing is extensible (use OpenGL?) - you don't need to make it pretty for the project, just make it work. Wireframe would be good enough as a proof of concept.
Loads of people have done their own versions of Elite (check out Oolite for an object oriented version, I think that one's in Objective-C) so the basics of the game mechanics are well understood.
But a client-server architecture that can support multiple players in the same star system and also scale up to loads of players across multiple star systems - that'd be a nice architectural challenge, given that you'd need to account for network effects from the low level (latency, ping, etc.) all the way up to game level (system consistency, etc.). A lot of this work has already been done with multiplayer games all the way back to Doom days, but nobody AFAICT has done Elite properly.
Presumably Braben is a tight fecker who won't let anyone do it commercially, and he's got no inclination of doing it himself. But as a uni opensource software project, it'd be a good starting point
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