My talk about “Powering a Live Escape Game with ECF & e(fx)clipse” got selected as an early bird for the EclipseCon Europe 2016! I’m very excited about this.

Actually, this whole thing got started exactly two years ago at the EclipseCon Europe 2014. I was there to learn about new technologies in my area of work as an RCP/JavaEE engineer and I remember that I had some free time in my schedule and stumbled over a talk by Wim Jongman How to cook an egg with the Eclipse Communication Framework and Nebula. That sounded like fun, so I went and had a look. I was immediately and completely hooked and ordered my first Raspberry Pi on my phone the same day. What really caught my interest was that the components could use ECF to remotely talk to each other without needing a server! And even better: With ECF discovery they would be able to find each other dynamically!! And all of that by simply coding OSGi services!!!

As soon I got home I started playing with this stuff but soon got bored because I didn’t have a real world project to work on. Around that time one of my oldest friends, Mike Kleist, built his first Live Escape Game in Interlaken, Switzerland: The Secret of the Captain. If you have never played a live escape game you should definitely check it out. It is a lot of fun! It’s played live (meaning you have to be physically present). You will be locked in a mysterious room full of puzzles, riddles, keys and locks where logic and creativity are the tools you need to escape.

Mike wanted to build another game in Munich and we started to talk about how we could create a technically enhanced version of this concept with lasers, hidden doors and a “bomb disarming simulation” you need to solve by cutting the right cables just like 007 in the movies. Mike had lots of ideas how to use this new technology for his game so we started to get to work. There would be multiple gadgets with different sensors and actors and there would also be an application to show the status of the game to the players.

Prototype of the bomb disarming simulation

Now, when you are dealing with any kind of creative process you really need to be agile. You literally need to be able to change the software sitting on the floor with your laptop two hours past midnight while the paint on the walls is still getting applied and the first players are scheduled to arrive in the morning. Using the ECF implementation of OSGi remote services proved to be the perfect technology for this task and during my talk I will demonstrate why.

Mike also wanted to have a display to show the status of the “bomb disarming simulation” to the players. Of course this should look really cool und make use of animations and sound effects. Using JavaFX as the UI technology for this task is pretty much a no-brainer because you get all of this out of the box and you even get a visual designer (Scene Builder) to create the look of the UI together with your artist. Now all I needed to do was to get this to work together with ECF, with proved to be equally easy using e(fx)clipse since they are both based on OSGi.

You need to solve all the riddles before the time is up!

And because everything worked together so beautifully, we also created a e4 application for the operator of the game, so he can see the status of all the sensors and actors and check that everything is working as it should. And of course the operator can remote control all the actors in the event of something not working as it should, for example if a sensor fails or a message gets lost in the network or whatever.

Game operator application

Et voilà! A new live escape game was born: The Missing Agent.

I want to take this opportunity to thank
– Wim Jongman for the inspiration
– Scott Lewis (ECF project lead) for the great support on the ecf mailing list
– and Tom Schindl (efxclipse project lead) for his equaly great support on the e(fx)clipse forum.

It’s people like this who make open source development so great and so much fun!
Hope to see you all at the EclipseCon Europe 2016!