CodeMetrpolis — A minecraft based collaboration tool for developers

Abstract

Data visualisation with high expressive power plays an important role in code comprehension. Recent visualisation tools try to fulfill the expectations of the users and use various analogies. For example, in an architectural metaphor, each class is represented by a building. Buildings are grouped into districts according to the structure of the namespaces. We think that these unique ways of code representation have great potential, but in our opinion they use very simple graphical techniques (shapes, figures, low resolution) to visualise the structure of the source code. On the other hand, computer games use high quality graphic and have high expressive power. A good example is Minecraft, a popular role playing game that supports both high definition, photo-realistic textures and long range 3D scene displaying. Additionally, it provides great extensibility and interactivity for third party software. In this paper, we introduce our mission to create a virtual world of source code in which developers and other stakeholders could explore and evaluate their project collaboratively in a virtual Minecraft world. Code properties are represented by graphical primitives offered by the game engine, and various interactivity features are planned. Besides challenges of the implementation there are some fundamental research issues considering the selection of a set of visual elements and mapping to source code properties. These elements have to be compatible not only with the visualisation and with the data model but also with the thinking of developers.

Memory Cities: Visualizing Heap Memory Evolution Using the Software City Metaphor

“…Software cities have been applied in the domains of concurrency visualization [22], software component communication and dependency visualization [11], [23]- [26], software performance visualization [63], [64], business process visualization [65], and test case analysis [66], [67]. Software cities have also been used in virtual reality [13], [14], [64], [68] and have been integrated into computer games such as Minecraft [69]. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to employ the software city visualization metaphor in the domain of memory monitoring.…”

VISON: An Ontology-Based Approach for Software Visualization Tool Discoverability

“…Three tools support the visualization of software systems quality based on the analysis of code smells. CodeCity [69] (shown in Figure 6) and CodeMetropolis [70] visualize software metrics based on the city metaphor. StenchBlossom [71] augments the Eclipse source code editor with ambient visualizations.…”

Past, Present, and Future of 3D Software Visualization - A Systematic Literature Analysis

“…The most frequently used category for the application of the third dimension is extending a 2D visualization (76, 39.4%). The resulting additional dimension is used for example to represent software metrics, such as LOC (Boccuzzo and Gall, 2007;Alam and Dugerdil, 2007;Wettel and Lanza, 2007;Kuhn et al, 2010), complexity (Sharif and Jetty, 2013;Balogh and Beszedes, 2013), or the number of modifications (Steinbrückner and Lewerentz, 2010), for relations (Balzer et al, 2004;, as well as for instances (Greevy et al, 2005;Waller et al, 2013). In some cases, the use of this dimension is configurable by the user (Marcus et al, 2003;Löwe and Panas, 2005).…”