Betaville: Your city is always in beta

User Code & Projects
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Project Name: Betaville

Game type:  MMO/City Building

Links:  http://bxmc.poly.edu

License:  Currently internally developed, planned GPL release

Contact:  sbook

Status:  In Development



Abstract:

I figure it’s time to announce what we’re working on over at BxmC, being that today marks a pretty big meeting regarding it :wink:



Betaville is a massively multiplayer online interactive city builder/planner/proposal framework that will allow normal folks to provide input on what they’d like to see in their surroundings.  Starting with what’s already there (i.e: NYC as it stands in July 2009), you will be able to modify, transform, revamp, or completely clear out and start over, the parts of your surrounding that affect you.



Working in conjunction with the M2C Institute in Bremen, Germany, the project is currently under active development.  I will be keeping this updated as we progress through milestones, although we’re currently more in network/databasing mode than pretty eye-candy mode



Used API’s:

jME2

JMF/llama’s ByteBufferRenderer

Java MySQL Connector

Sun’s RSS Utilities

FengGUI







Now, jME in the spotlight (7/15/09):





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Sounds like a great project man :slight_smile: I hope you guys will push some boundaries!



If I might ask though, could it be possible to get a somewhat detailed ‘story’ on what led up to jMonkeyEngine as your engine of choice for this project (and others)? The project happening under a respected university and all, it could be really cool if you guys could put together a serious case study of sorts, for us to direct people to here on the website.



If you search ‘case study’ on this Hudson page you’ll find a couple good ones, like this one made by JBoss.

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erlend_sh said:

If I might ask though, could it be possible to get a somewhat detailed 'story' on what led up to jMonkeyEngine as your engine of choice for this project (and others)? The project happening under a respected university and all, it could be really cool if you guys could put together a serious case study of sorts, for us to direct people to here on the website.


but of course, here's the short of it.  I can work on a longer answer if you'd like, but this is about the entirety of it..  

We're using the jMonkeyEngine for a few main reasons:

  • Open Source:  It's free for us to use, easy for us to extend, and easy for us to contribute back to.

  • Cross Platform:  Because it's built on Java, we're able to deploy Betaville to a number of target Operating Systems, including consideration for possible mobile device uses.

  • WebStart:  Again, because of it's Java roots, games made in jME can be deployed over the web and started directly from a webpage.  This equates to a higher possible saturation of users as not all users are comfortable using 'downloaded' software or they do not have the privileges necessary to perform installation.

  • Networking:  Java's highly scalable over the network and requires a great deal less effort to create than something comparable in C++.