Part of designing a good serious game platform not only lies
with the ability for the users/participants to be able to use the game itself
but also in the ability for the managing party to easy install and manage.
Today I'm looking at the installation of the University of Hawaii Energy
Conservation game system, Makahiki, the backbone to the Kukui Cup competition I
looked at previously.
To tackle this attempt it was important that I used a system
that was capable of doing all that was required of the Makahiki system. While I
am usually a Windows user, it became obvious through my experience working with
Django and Heroku that it would be a greater trek to attempt to use the Windows
environment I'm accustomed to and instead opted to make use of VirtualBox and
Linux 12.04 LTS to give a stable enough Unix based experience for installation.
That being said, I began to follow the instructions for installing Makahiki
locally found here.
As I went into this task, it was clear that I was going to
be fighting the natural problem that comes with anyone unaccustomed to the UNIX
environment: installing and operating the necessary programs to run Makahiki.
One common issue I believe that plays out when finding instructions for
operating in a Linux environment, and that is the extra sets to installing
programs. While it becomes a repetitious pattern eventually to installing bits
and pieces from the many Linux resources (apt-get, install, easy-install, pip,
etc.), there is not always free instructions regarding the installation of
programs and tools on the sites themselves. It is through the common practice of Readme
files that I found my answers. I'm confident
that it might also located somewhere on their sites, just not in the obvious
ways that one might find Windows install instructions or executable installers.
Though the challenge of installing was a minor issue, slight
extra issues occurred in the classification of certain options, 2.1.1.1.1.6
involved installing the virtualenvwrapper to allow a self contained system, but
on install at first contained issues in defining what needed to be add to
configurations for it to work properly. "Add three lines to your shell
startup file" followed by two possible files and an etc. may lead to
different options but could also be an issue if you weren't sure of the most
efficient option. At the same time an issue had occurred with the wrappers file
that required I look up an error and find that I needed to also define the
Python bin in the .bashrc before hand, which was not defined in the
installation instructions. Other small issues occur when installing the PIL
(2.1.1.1.7.2) where the PNG package is zlib but also could be libz according to
the coding example following it.
Besides other ventures in the Serious Game Development
class, I have not had prior experience to the database or server system. I went
into this knowing only what I've cobbled together from Google searches and the
instructions provided for the class, including some of the variable confusion
which had occurred previously with PostgreSQL. That said, I believe the intent
and direction for installation is there and consistent, but limited by the
general expectations of a Linux environment. I am not claiming it a fault of
Linux, as for a seasoned Linux user it all must seem like second nature, but for
someone new to the system it can create a little extra time consumption work
through the instructions. In addition, much of the issues occur outside the
Makahiki installation tutorials and to the linked tutorials for me.
In the end, I was still able to achieve my goal and install
Makahiki locally
It should also be noted as a general word of warning to
watch your the size of your hard drive when working in a virtual environment. I
had not thought about the necessary space for swap and so I was confused when I
had run out of space in my system and needed to resize my virtual disk and
partition in order to ensure that everything installed correctly. A minor
trivial problem, and yet one that took more time than I would have liked. It's
general practice issue that I've learned time and time again, if you don't know
the system well enough, expect to invest extra time to get it right. I'd
estimate, if I remember right, that the Makahiki element took around an hour
with some wait time. But prepping my system and getting ready for the next
challenge added a lot more.
No comments:
Post a Comment