Ideas for a programming project

[Negal_Horde]

Hi folks,

I'm taking programming classes (after hours classes or whatever the Dutch "avondschool" translates into) and I'm currently in my third and final year. We need to do a final group project, and while we already have two decent ideas, I'd like to know if perhaps someone could help out in the ideas department, because I'm not good at finding ideas myself and I really want to be able to avoid making a resource management program. If only we had Kaja-Cola for real...

The ideas our group had so far:

• An order management application so people in administration can keep track of supplies and when to order new supplies (which I personally find to be rather stale, hardly challenging and above all, BORING)
• A "turtle race" web application, where you start out with a few turtles. The turtles would have some basic traits, grow up, can breed and could be sold or enter races for prize money. Another group member got this idea based off of an old website that had dove races and found out that turtles also are great at pathfinding. This one would be harder to make, but it certainly does sound more challenging and interesting.

So far, nothing is written in stone yet, but the preferred technologies would be .NET, ASP.NET and SQL Server, because most of what we've learned is C# and ASP.NET and Java, while cross plattform (which appeals to me as a Linux user), is not as nice to work with as .NET and Visual Studio.

I would greatly appreciate input on this, since I'm not sure the other 2 group members (we have 4 group members) will go for the rather awesome turtle race (I can see myself "beta testing" that one a lot :P ). And if I can avoid it, I'd rather not make a supply management (or anything that ends in "management" unrelated to games) application, even if it does look better on a CV than "co-developper of a web-based turtle racing game". Also, if it's finished (or "close enough" beta) and we can get it up and operational, I'll be happy to link it here as well.

[cabby]

Since it's a class project what requirements do you need to meet for the class? This would help some I think in coming up with ideas.

[silverhawk11]

Exactly what cabby said. If the project requirements include using .NET, then I'd avoid using Java and just stick with C#. How long of a time frame do you have for the final project? Are you able to complete the latter project within said time frame and eliminate major bugs? How do your other team members feel about the two projects?

[Negal_Horde]

Sorry for the late reply, had network class and my laptops' Linux partition has gone haywire on me (note to self: next time, check the HCL BEFORE buying a new laptop)

Anyways, the point of the project is to utilize seen technologies (C#.NET, ASP.NET, SQL Server and Java) and learn to look up things (Linq, Entity Framework, deployment 101,...) for ourselves, since Google now has replaced TFM, so that's what we're supposed to read. We have until late May/early June to work on the project, and have several presentations to give between now and early June (dates aren't fixed yet).

We don't have to use all the languages/technologies we've seen, but writing it in .NET or Java makes it easier for the teachers to evaluate and grade our progress. Since we have had nowhere near enough of a solid base in Java, every other group I've heard from is definitely using the .NET framework in one way or another (mostly ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC), and I'm pretty sure we'll be using C#/.NET in one way or another.

So far, the turtle racing web game is in the lead, but one of our group members is still on holiday and hasn't been able to check his mails yet, so we can't make any final decisions until he's back. We did get together before class, and so far the basic agreement is that if we make the supply management app, we'll be using the 3-tier model with custom-made entity classes with a generic data access layer to allow for Access and Mysql implementations as well. If we go for a purely web based application like the turtle racing game, we'll be using Linq/Entity Framework which would appear to be SQL Server preferred...

[cabby]

Have you thought about maybe a web game that's similar to something like the pitstopboss or cyber airlines games that are in my signature? Turtles might be nice and all but to me that kind of game would be geared toward kids more where a racing or airline type game would both have a large adult audience.

[Negal_Horde]

Those games do look nice. We don't really have any audience in mind, though, high grades and having fun while we're at it are the key priorities. Also, the turtles were chosen because of their pathfinding capabilities, since the idea is based on a dove "racing" game no longer online one of our group members used to play. The races would be static events over which the user has no control other than entering his/turtle.

[cabby]

I had just thought that maybe something like the games in my signature would be slightly easier. You wouldn't need any path finding since they both primarily do information lookup and manipulation.

[silverhawk11]

Personally, I say go for the turtle game. If your team members like the idea, and you're excited to develop it, then there's absolutely no reason to not do it unless it's an unrealistic goal. I can't say anything regarding your CV, as I'm not transferring schools until Fall 12', but I'm sure they'd like to see examples of your work, no matter the application.

If you think that the first project is easy, albeit boring, then why not develop it when you've completed school and are looking for a job? You can still work on projects outside of school!

[Negal_Horde]

I should know by Thursday if it's ok for the entire group, but the turtle game is almost certainly what we'll go for. Since there won't be any visual output for the races themselves, pathfinding won't be much of an issue. We'll just make a few racing grounds with predefined obstacles (where they could fall) and "tough spots" (where they could lose time by picking the wrong way) and let the server calculate how well those turtles did, based on chance, modified by their stats. The users then get a personalized race report and there will be a publicly accessible leaderboard for each race (or at least the top 10 to pick a random number).

As for the first project, I don't think it's easy, just an extended version of what we've already seen and done without putting much new ideas in it. And I enjoy laying out logic flows and nifty little systems, at the end of the road (and after some serious swearing) it's far more satisfying to help shape something than do the same old thing everyone's already done before. I guess you could compare it to a musician playing Mozart and a musician playing something he wrote himself, neither are easy, but wouldn't you rather be playing your own piece, even if it's not as brilliant as Mozart?

[silverhawk11]

If I could write music, then I would absolutely want to play my own . I have trouble remembering how to read music as is! . You should let us try the racing game (if you end up creating that) when it's done! I love playing games that were made as a Senior year project at college. They're usually a lot of fun.

[zgdev2]

So far, nothing is written in stone yet, but the preferred technologies would be .NET, ASP.NET and SQL Server, because most of what we've learned is C# and ASP.NET and Java, while cross plattform (which appeals to me as a Linux user), is not as nice to work with as .NET and Visual Studio.

Sounds like you're building something industrial-scale. I'd personally recommend you to stick with whatever language the most of your p̶a̶r̶t̶y̶ group is comfortable with. I don't really think that you'll have a big benefit using those large libs, but if those things are new to everyone of you, alot of time, tears etc are going to be wasted for nothing. For a Web project you pretty much have Java/PHP/Lua/Perl/Ruby/LISP etc which would cover up pretty much every existent programming paradigm and have all a very nice set of existing code and templates. I guess as a Linux user you haven't had much exposure to C#, therefore instead of doing cool stuff you'll just eat up most of the effort by making yourself a working environment under Linux and getting used to the new language, although apache is rumored to play with ASP quite well.

By the way, know what's would be a cool and cross-platform implementation? SVG, controlled by AJAX with something of your choice serverwise. Vector graphics, no flash, web-based, every sane browser-friendly.

[silverhawk11]

Sounds like you're building something industrial-scale. I'd personally recommend you to stick with whatever language the most of your p̶a̶r̶t̶y̶ group is comfortable with. I don't really think that you'll have a big benefit using those large libs, but if those things are new to everyone of you, alot of time, tears etc are going to be wasted for nothing. For a Web project you pretty much have Java/PHP/Lua/Perl/Ruby/LISP etc which would cover up pretty much every existent programming paradigm and have all a very nice set of existing code and templates. I guess as a Linux user you haven't had much exposure to C#, therefore instead of doing cool stuff you'll just eat up most of the effort by making yourself a working environment under Linux and getting used to the new language, although apache is rumored to play with ASP quite well.

By the way, know what's would be a cool and cross-platform implementation? SVG, controlled by AJAX with something of your choice serverwise. Vector graphics, no flash, web-based, every sane browser-friendly.

I actually completely forgot he said he was on Linux :P. You'd probably be better off following zgdev2's advice because it could be annoying using C# and .NET, but I could be wrong.

[Negal_Horde]

Actually, while I use Linux at home, my laptop I use for school does have Windows and the programming classes mostly covered C#.NET extensively for the past 2 years. So we're all familiar with the Microsoft stack, which is why it would be preferred. Java is the only other programming language we've seen, and using any other language will likely be a grade/deal breaker, as the teachers that grade us also have a .NET background.

I should warn you that if it gets online, it will likely be in Dutch, but I'll try to lean on the other group member to implement multilingual support as well. It may also be a while before it goes online, and not everything will always go as fast as it will when it's first online, because everything might need (re)testing when using more users than our own group...

[cabby]

If you get the multilingual thing going I'm sure there are plenty of us here who would be willing to help out with any grammatical or spelling errors.

[zgdev2]

If you get the multilingual thing going I'm sure there are plenty of us here who would be willing to help out with any grammatical or spelling errors.

/me volounteers for Russian