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Thursday Aug 30, 2007

Project Darkstar's Programmer Dream

Scaling up to support the hundreds of thousands, even millions of users playing massive online games is an ongoing industry problem. The goal with Sun's Project Darkstar is to provide an infrastructure that lets people write massive multiplayer online games that can scale dynamically, while not being required to change their programming model.

Jim Waldo, distinguished engineer, principal investigator at Sun Labs and chief architect of Project Darkstar, joins Innovating@Sun host Hal Stern for a podcast that highlights how Project Darkstar addresses the issues with massive multi-player online games. Listen in to hear about:

  • How Sun is working to hide multi-threading and distribution to scale games up behind a simple, single-threaded programming model
  • Work being done to expand and contract the number of machines being used for a particular game without having to reprogram the game
  • Major innovations including a system tailored to event-based programming
  • Why Java shows a performance advantage due to dynamic compilation and short run tasks
  • How to get your hands on the Project Darkstar open source binaries and server source code
  • Efforts to encourage partners to integrate modules for things like billing as well as efforts to make the project grid-enabled

    If you're interested in network game development, check out the latest edition of Innovating@Sun and go to Project Darkstar to pick up documentation, tutorials, or the binary. Check out sample programs and Javadoc. Don't worry about what platform you're running, it's all in Java. Get involved in forums and start playing today!

    Links:



    Transcript
    Project Darkstar Website
    Project Darkstar Overview
    Darkstar CTO Interview
    Project Darkstar: Changing the Game

    • Posted at 01:46PM Aug 30, 2007 by Laura Ventura in Sun [permalink] Comments [4]

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