Darkstar project is kooool, and is the koolest project i’ve ever seen in dev.java game section. But i’m wondering if there is any development tools or IDE like eclipse plugins for Darkstar game server development ? Because from my humble opinion this will makes the project development much easier and efficient. The eclipse plugins for j2ee app dev is a very good example.
At current there are no Darkstar specific tools or plugins. Thsi si something we are exp[loring moving foward.
However Darkstar GLOs are much simpler then EJBs. Once you understand the concepts behind them they really arent that much different fromw riting any standard Java class.
I suppose that having a nice deployment mechanism would be a first step (but this requires some help from Darkstar side).
Next possible tool would be something showing relations between GLOs (kind of class UML diagram, but not based on the classes and pointer reference, but on GLOs and GLOReference).
Performance monitoring tool is also a possibility - with some kind of log/graphs showing number of read/write locked retrievals of GLO per second plus having a full trace of it.
Nothing critical, but it looks like a nice hobby project for somebody, given a bit of support from Darkstar team.
Gpood thouyghst thanks. That last, monitoring internal GLO useage at run time, is something we are defintiely thinkign actively about.
If there is information or hooks people need for writing an external tool that they want to work on, they shoudl contact me and Ill see what I can do.
JK
GLOReference is not the only way of relations between GLO, other ones are all those event listeners which might activate a GLO; seen as entry points to certain activities in the GLO pool, these event listeners are very important also.
Ragosch
Another useful piece of functionality in an IDE plug-in would be support for debugging your server code. Right now, I switch to a shell to restart the game server each time I change my code, but this is inconvenient and doesn’t support debugging. It would be nice if there were, say, an Eclipse Run configuration for running a piece of your project in the context of a game server, which could perhaps also take care of creating a dummy SGS-apps.conf on the fly for you so you wouldn’t have to bother about it while developing.
Have you tried putting all your application code inside a classpath of SGS server (unpacked) and doing only startup class inside actual game jar ? This way you should be probably able to run SGS in debug mode from eclipse and be able to use hotswap to change your application classes on the fly, as they would be in main jvm classloader. I know it is not a setup for real deployment, but still should be a lot faster than even explicit support for redeployment/restart of entire application jar - plus you can do some changes even on the fly with running data.
Is Darkstar good from any MMO?
If I udnerstand the question the answer is yes.
Thanks for your comment on not needing to package stuff in a Jar and run the SGS start script to run your own server. I’ve worked out your advice into a little tutorial for debugging game servers from Eclipse and posted it in this separate thread.
Cool! Thanks!
Maybe we coudl put it on a page in the project site wiki?
Sure!
Um – there’s a project site wiki? Where is it?
Hm. Thought we got one as part of the dev.java.net part I dont see it. Maybe we need to do it through java.net… I’ll look into it and get abck to you.