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Unicron:
A Virtual Computer Science Community
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Project To Do List
Virtual CS Department:
We are building a virtual edition of the NMSU CS department within Science Hall.
NMSU Facilities folks have
CAD data files, and public floor plans with more
accurate representations of Science Hall .
Of course we are mainly interested in the 1st Floor.
Our first subgoal was to implement a Virtual PLEASE lab. NMSU's Programming
Languages, Environments, and Automated Software Engineering Lab,
located in Science Hall Room 167, is a 12'x20' room
(ceiling approximately 9' high) with a whiteboard, 4-5 workstations, and
a printer. This demo went through many revisions before giving way to a
department-wide demo.
Downloads:
The following downloads are available. They are still in development
with known bugs, and are updated frequently.
Demos:
Demos generally require a machine with hardware OpenGL capabilities,
as well as a current copy of the Unicon language, such as these
Windows Unicon binaries in order to run.
They might also run on a current CVS build of Unicon with 3D
facilities enabled, but Dr. J might need to check in some X11
event handling tweaks for you.
Informal demos have been done by several other folks; to get your demo
into this section you must deliver code to Dr. J and he must be able to run
it (somewhat) successfully.
| Dr. J
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- Improved PLEASE lab; Dr. J's Demo will constitute our Flagship.
Other team members should integrate their work into this demo.
- The Ruminator, an unfinished simple "level generator" which
works from floor plans.
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| Nolan Clayton
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- Nolan's Pegasus program is a collaborative IDE.
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| Iyad Abu Doush's ModView
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- Iyad wrote a 2D viewer to help debug our 3D model, with a little
help from Dr. J.
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| Yo Sep Kim's Avatars
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- Yo has developed the version 1 and 2 avatars for our CVE
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| Kosta Tachtevrenidis and Akshay Dabholkar's
Monoceros
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- This is a collaborative IDE + network server prototype.
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| Anil Teella
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- Anil is in charge of adding sound effects to our CVE
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| Wynn Winkler
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- Check out Wynn's networked-multi-avatar demo. Earlier Wynn Winkler
tried out many 3D models, VRML, and floor plan editors.
He finally hit paydirt with the Int3D editor from www.Int3D.com, and
made a preliminary demonstration of a VRML version of our please lab.
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| Samat Jain
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- Samat Jain has been kind enough to develop a multiuser map window for
the unicron CVE client.
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| Gustav Verhulsdonck's Virtual Frank page
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- Gustav interviewed Frank Harary in anticipation of building a virtual
Frank into our CVE. However, the plans for that feature are on hold.
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| Spring 2004 Demos
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- In Spring 2004 students developed earlier demos
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CVS Source Distribution
To use the CVS repository source distribution for the Unicron CVE, follow these
instructions:
- Ask Dr. J to be added to the "unicron group" on the CS UNIX systems.
Generally, this is for RA's employed on the project.
- Obtain a CVS client, if you need one.
- Set your CVSROOT variable to /home/uni1/jeffery/unicron
On Windows, its username@unicon.cs.nmsu.edu:/home/uni1/jeffery/unicron.
Some users say :ext:username@unicon.cs.nmsu.edu:/home/uni1/jeffery/unicron.
- Set your CVS_RSH variable to ssh. On windows, it may be ssh2 or putty,
and this needs to be on your PATH, or you need to specify its path.
- do a "cvs checkout unicron". This will create a subdirectory under
whatever directory you do it from, so you may want to "cd" somewhere first.
- cd into unicron subdirectory you have just checked out
- type "make". This assumes you have a good working "make.exe" on your path
- cd into bin subdirectory
- type "./unicron"
What's in a Name?
The name for our CVE client is nsh.
nsh stands for "New Science Hall", or "NMSU's Science Hall", or perhaps
"new shell", since the collaborative virtual environment we are building
will eventually constitute an entire working environment.
Unicron is the name for our CVE architecture, network protocol, and our
prototype server. The name Unicron was suggested by Mike Kemp. It comes
from the Transformers children's toy line, with associated cartoons and
comic books. Unicron is a giant robot the size of an entire planet, who
roams the universe devouring planets and stars. While this makes a rather
silly metaphor for our virtual CS department, it is an artificial world,
which is what we are building.
