Gardening MMORPG

WIP games, tools & toy projects Archived Projects
#1

I recently set up an Early Beta of my Gardening based MMOG, “Gardens of Kyresoo”. Its at www.kyresoo.com . This part tests the flower growing, breeding and gene engineering code. The world itself isn’t built yet. The game objective is to “Create moments of Beauty”.

It’s intended to be a slow paced, non-addictive game you can interrupt easily. Judging from the other games posted, most of the browsers here aren’t in the target market. But if you could test out a couple of the gardening tools (java apps) and respond to the Survey on the Beta page, it would be helpful. Particularly if you have access to some low end laptops or desktop machines with motherboard graphics. I figure my target market likely just have the graphics the machine came with, and I am interested to see how JOGL does on those machines. Pretty good in the early tests. I’m particularly interested if you had to use the “Disable Transparency” option to get the “labtray” tool to run on a laptop.

Thanks.

#2

Whoa, thats… weird. Really nice idea but the totally alien and unintuitive interface is impenatrable (even while reading the tutorial). Separate apps hidden in a tools directory which magically communicate with each other? WTF? :o

#3

Good feedback. Thanks.

The metaphor I am aiming for is gardening tools in a toolbox. My current thinking is that bundling them into one huge app would be more confusing that helpful. I’m hoping the “magical communication” stuff will make more sense once people come to this part of the game through the world, and not by a back door straight into the gene lab.

Don’t forget that this Early Beta is a test of the ‘End game’ which I don’t expect many players to reach. Touring gardens and picking seeds to plant in your own garden should be much more straighforward. Learning about this game though the Early Beta is a bit like learning WoW by joining a Raid. I’m hoping at this stage I can find a small group of hardcore digital plant enthusiasts who scale the steep learning curve. Your response indicates its pretty steep though.

#4

what’s up with Windows executables and bundled JRE with JOGL native in libs directory? I’m forced to reboot into Windows just to see what could have been launched using Webstart or something? I mean, I can manage java -Dlibrary.path=./.java/cache/jars… -jar labtray.jar & but boy, it feels wrong…

#5

what OS are you running on, denka?

#6

Solaris 10 on x86-64

#7

I’m not that familiar with Solaris. Could the required commands to start up a set of executable jars be packaged in some sort of script file? At the moment, I am focussed on getting a Windows centric packaged version of the Early Beta out. It would be nice if Java had lived up to the early hopes of “write once, run anywhere”. But, after reading the long discussions about application deployment on these forums, it seems like that is not the case. Outside of these Java centric forums, my sense is that not packaging my apps as a familiar .exe will be a barrier to distribution.

As far as WebStart is concerned, I have of course considered it. I’ve read a lot of the debate pro and con WebStart here. I think it is a great tool for its designed environment, keeping desktop applications in step in a major enterprise. In a home desktop environment, its not as useful. You can distribute a single game application with a small amount of data. Or even a large amount, as WURM online demonstrates, though I suspect that took a good deal of effort. It doesn’t seem well suited to a set of cooperating application using local files though.

Judging from this conversation, http://java.sun.com/developer/community/askxprt/2006/jl0410.html, the JWS team do understand its weaknesses as an application installation tool, and it may get more suitable in later releases. It will be a good while before I get the “world” part of the online world done, so I will take another look at it then.

#8

Looks interesting! I’ll try it out soon.

#9

I’ve changed the description of the current code release from “Early Beta” to “Tech Demo”. Several people have pointed out there real isn’t any “game” code there yet. The flower growing code does seem to be running on a good variety of graphics cards though, thanks to JOGL.

#10

Haven’t tried it yet, but the description is intriguing. It sort of reminds me of SimEarth’s GAIA Feature, where you cultivate a planet of flowers and such. It was more of a text-based/theory driven scenario; I was too busy slamming my planets with meteorites back then in the catastrophe mode heh heh