advice

[icedust]

I'm considering creating of creating a online RPG or online football management game. But since I'm only around intermediate(barely, perhaps), I'm going to limit the project to things I know mostly, and exclude graphical stuff. I know the basics, OOP, medium about GUI(and Events), a little about threads. However I don't know network programming yet or databases(though I know regular file-writing), obviously I'll need to grasp those at some point. What I'm curious about however, if I could create a functioning game, and add a proper database, network feature later, or if that would be an immense/impossible task to do. To my great frustration, I'm not experienced enough to know

Also somehow, I think some Java web technology would be more appropriate for what I have in mind, rather than GUI. But I know next to nothing about those(what is available, suitable for my project), so any suggestions about that would be greatly appreciated :)
Thanks,
-Mike

[nathandelane]

Your project sounds like fun. It is definitely advanced. You will probably be dealing with, as you stated, both a web entity and an application of sorts. You could unify these much more closely if you had a web site, however a web site introduces other technologies which you will need to learn, such as HTTP, HTML, and potentially JavaScript, CSS, and others. To simplify your goal, I would begin with a simple server-client model on your desktop operating system. You won't necessarily need to work with a GUI at this point -- you could do everything in text-mode (on a terminal) at first. You may even choose not to start out with a client-server model, rather simply create a single-threaded multi-tier model in a simple program. Get an understand of the database stuff you intend to implement, and then break it into larger more separate pieces in the future. You will learn a lot that way. Which would you rather do however? A desktop application or a web application?