The Project Darkstar development team is pleased to announce the availability of the Project Darkstar v0.9.11 distribution release.  This release introduces a new extension system that eases building, distributing, and using custom components designed to extend the core functionality of the Project Darkstar Server.  The new system establishes a standardized extension format that supports automatically deploying and enabling custom services, authenticators, and other pluggable components in the core.  Other highlights of the release include the new shouldContinue() method on the TaskManager API to assist in breaking down work into smaller task units. Changelog summaries from each distribution component follow below.

Project Darkstar Java Client SDK, v0.9.11:
* - Fixes issues #12, #17

Project Darkstar C Client SDK, v0.9.11:
* Changed the channel name from a wchar_t* to a char*

On August 12, 2009 the Project Darkstar team at Sun announced that a survey of the Project Darkstar Community was being conducted in order to get a better understanding of who is using Project Darkstar and for what. The survey is now closed, but it produced some very useful information about our community and what is important to our members.  We are pleased to share a summary of the final results with the entire Project Darkstar Community.

Highlights:

1. 109 respondents - Wow!  This far exceeded our expectations.
2. 54% (59) are using Project Darkstar for a game or application.  Great!
3. 38% (41) plan to release a commercial Project Darkstar game or application within a year.  Really Great!
4. 75% (82) responded to question 6 (what is the most important thing the Darkstar team at Sun can do) and 51% (56) responded to question 8 with comments, guidance and suggestions.  There were some really great suggestions and comments which are all very helpful!

With regard to the most important thing the Project Darkstar team at Sun can do, the most common answers were multi-node scaling (34) and better documentation, tutorials, and examples (16).  From these comments, it appears that the primary focus of our technical efforts - solving the multi-node scaling problem - appears to be in alignment with the highest priority of the developer community.  So it seems like we're on the right track.  We do understand that the community wants better documentation and examples and while it will take a bit longer for us to attend to this issue, we are currently trying to make some improvements to make the documentation we have more accessible.  Please stay tuned for those improvements and keep the specific suggestions coming.

This pdf report summarizes the final survey results as of October 2, 2009.  More information about the survey is published on the Project Darkstar Adoption Survey wiki page, including a preliminary report which summarized the results as of September 1, 2009 as discussed in the adoption survey forum thread.

The Project Darkstar team at Sun wishes to encourage everyone in the community to continue sharing information about their applications, projects, plans, hopes, and dreams though the Project Darkstar website.  Sharing this information benefits our entire community and it could be good for individuals as well (as your name and your project will become quite visible to the thousands of game industry professionals who visit the Darkstar site).  One simple thing you could do is to list your application as an "in development" effort on the applications wiki page (one of the most visited pages on the site).  Or, if you are working on a project which is complementary to Project Darkstar, please consider listing your project on the projects wiki page.  Another possibility would be to publish a use case profile on the case studies wiki page.  The Project Darkstar team at Sun is also available for private conversations with community members who prefer not to publicly disclose information about their projects.  We have now followed up personally with all survey respondents who indicated it was ok for us to do so and the information exchange has been very valuable.

We are grateful to all who took the time to complete the survey.  Please continue sharing information broadly and as always, we look forward to great community feedback through whatever channel it arrives.  Thanks again!!

The Project Darkstar team is back from a week at the Austin Game Developer's Conference!

We all had a great week in Austin. While conference attendance was down a bit from last year (Gamasutra reported that attendance was 2650 for the 2009 show, compared to 3000 in 2008 ), we had plenty of foot traffic through our booth and we were very pleased with the quality of the conversations we had with the people who stopped by to talk to us. Most were previously familiar with Project Darkstar, and all were excited about the progress that we have been making towards a scalable multi-node version of the technology.

The booth was configured with seven demo stations. Two were used for Project Darkstar technology demos (details below). One was devoted to the Project Darkstar community. Another was used by our Sun colleague Jagat Bhuyan to highlight Sun's Startup Essentials program. Two pods were denoted as "Ask the Experts" stations for people to engage in deeper conversations with our technical team members. The final pod was dedicated to our friends at Ph03nix New Media who were demoing their game TRZZonline which uses Darkstar as its back end server technology.

For the first demo, we had Project Snowman running in a multi-node cluster and showed how the new node health monitoring features of Darkstar caused client traffic to spill over and be intelligently distributed between the nodes. Check out a quick video of Keith Thompson talking through the demo on the expo floor:

The second demo had Darkchat running on a multi-node cluster and was designed to show how clients would relocate between nodes depending on which rooms they were connected to in the application. Here's a quick video of Owen Kellett giving that demo on the expo floor:

Speaking of Owen, he has put together an excellent blog post detailing more of what went on in Austin. Definitely a worthwhile read! One of the things that Owen talks about is the trials and tribulations of developers scrambling to get their demos ready, and that often involves tracking down a pesky bug or two. But oh the joy when you finally figure out a problem and fix it! The picture below captures that triumphant moment when (L-R) Owen Kellett, Keith Thompson, and Seth Proctor finally figured out what was behind a tricky problem with Darkchat.

Who said debugging isn't some of the most fun a developer could have?

Of course, a trip to Austin would not be complete without some great BBQ. The team had dinner one night at Stubbs with our friends from Ph03nix New Media, including Tim Perreault (L) and Colin Fitzgerald (R) . We owe a huge thank you to you guys for all you've have been doing to support Darkstar and it was great having you with us in Austin!!

Finally, here's a picture of the Sun Darkstar team members who made the trip to Austin for the conference. We also want to acknowledge the other members of our team who did not travel to Austin but who have worked just as hard as anyone to help make the event a success: engineers Jane Loizeaux, Ann Wollrath, and Tim Blackman, IT specialist Gary Cutbill, biz dev guru Mike Gialis, and administrative assistant extraordinaire Heidi Peabody. Thanks to all you guys!

L-R Chris Melissinos, Owen Kellett, Jim Waldo, Keith Thompson, Karl Haberl, Jennifer Kotzen, John Crowell, Seth Proctor

In a previous post I announced that we were conducting a survey to get a better understanding of who is using Project Darkstar and for what. People have been asking if we would share some of the results. In response, I have created a wiki page on the Project Darkstar site and posted a summary of the results obtained as of September 1, 2009. Please check it out!

A few highlights include:

1) 83 respondents - in our opinion an outstanding response rate for a survey of this type

2) 59% (49) are using Darkstar for a game or applicaton

3) 45% (37) plan to release a commercial Darkstar game or application within a year

4) 78% (65) answered question 6 and 58% (48) answered question 8 - with some great suggestions and comments - very helpful!

With regard to the "most important thing" (question 6) for us to do, the most common answers were multi-node scaling (28) and better documentation and examples (13). From this, it appears that the primary focus of our technical efforts - solving the multi-node scaling problem - appears to be in alignment with the highest priority of our developer community. So it seems like we're on the right track. (And we hear you about getting better doc and examples. :-)

We expect to continue to update the results as more responses come in.

 If you already responded to the survey - thank you! If not, it's not too late. At this point, the survey is still open and we would welcome your input.

Greetings!

We are updating Sun's plans regarding future roadmap and investments in Project Darkstar, and would like to ask you, the members of the Darkstar community, to help us do that. We recognize and appreciate that many of you have invested considerable time and energy into Darkstar and all have a stake and interest in its future.

It is in the nature of open source projects that there can be all kinds of things going on that we don't even know about. We understand and respect that adoption metrics are imprecise and that stealthy habits are common for commercial game projects. Acknowledging those conditions, we've created a short *anonymous* survey that attempts to give us a better understanding of who is using Darkstar and for what.

The survey contains just five multiple choice questions and a couple of open-ended questions for you to tell us whatever you like. All responses will be kept confidential within the Sun team and the survey is anonymous.

We would greatly appreciate you taking a few minutes to fill out the survey. And spread the word. Ask any friends or colleagues who are using Darkstar to fill it out too.

Here is the URL:

Project Darkstar Adoption Survey

Thank you !

Karl Haberl
Director, Project Darkstar
Sun Microsystems Laboratories

Recently, the Sun Startup Essentials team hosted a free webinar to discuss how Project Darkstar meets many of the biggest challenges that developers of online games are facing.  In a previous post, we pointed out some of the advantages available to startups through Sun Startup Essentials and highlighted this cool sounding webinar.  The audio is sometimes a bit muffled, but you can now check out this video replay.

Getting started with Project Darkstar is no small undertaking.  The rewards are high, but like all great technologies it does take some time and effort to come up to speed with this new online game architecture.  Those developers who lean into that learning curve and start building a few Project Darkstar based applications usually reach the conclusion that Darkstar is very cool. :-)  Thankfully, there are a wealth of resources to help both the newbie and the more experienced Darkstar developer get to that point and achieve all of their online game goals.  The Project Darkstar Forums is often the place developers come to looking for answers and that's a friendly option and a great place to begin.   Another winning idea is to browse the resources on the new Project Darkstar Tutorials wiki.  It's stacked to the brim with information to help developers navigate through the entire process of installing, running, and developing applications for Project Darkstar.  Recently published and leveraging the common experience of our more seasoned community members, the Tutorials wiki is a great place to get you going.

One highlight of this new resource is the public availability of the Project Darkstar Hands on Lab presented at JavaOne 2009.  In the Project Snowman: Developing a 3D Multiplayer Game Using Project Darkstar hands on lab participants learn about the process of building a 3D, multiplayer, capture-the-flag style snowball fighting game from the ground up using Project Darkstar.  This lab is a great opportunity for anyone to get up to speed quickly with Project Darkstar.  It covers installation, running the server and clients, message protocol, managed objects, managed references, channels, message processing, logins, matchmaking, chat, and more.  That's just a taste of the many resources available on the Tutorials wiki, so, borrowing the title of the hit song by the Black Eyed Peas... Let's get it started.

And lastly... speaking of JavaOne, our very own Owen Kellett was interviewed at the conference by the editor for java.net, Kevin Farnham.  In this community corner podcast, Owen discusses Project Darkstar technology topics ranging from latency and durability tradeoffs to write caching and transparent scalability.  Tune in to get the skinny on the recent developments from the land of Project Darkstar.

Last week I listened to Matt Hosanne's (first in a series) webinar about Project Darkstar and the Sun Startup Essentials program.  WOW! What a combination for new online game companies!

If you're using (or thinking about using) Project Darkstar, and your company is small, young, and strapped for cash, you should definitely look into Sun's Startup Essentials program.   Membership is free, and gives you these benefits:

• Discounted hardware
• Discounted partner hosting
• Open source software
• Free support and training
• Access to a diverse investor network (U.S. only)

To qualify, your company needs to match this entrepreneurial profile:

• < 6 years in business
• < 150 people
• based in a country in which the program is offered
  
• has a verifiable company presence  (e.g. website, profile) and a valid street address

If that sound like you, then you can participate in the program!  Contact Matt or check out the Sun Startup Essentials web page for more details.

:-)

Project Darkstar was represented in a big way at JavaOne this year.  Demos were given, labs were taught, presentations were delivered, and fun was had. 

The biggest splash was the surprise launch of DarkCHAT, a multiuser visual chat environment with a 100% JavaFX front end and a 100% Project Darkstar back end.   DarkCHAT was used by conference attendees to make spontaneous connections during the conference.  At one point, even Java programming icon James Gosling joined the DarkCHAT fun.  Some good news for our community is that during final testing, Project Darkstar handled 10k DarkCHAT clients without any difficulty.  Very cool.

Tonnect, a company providing a multiplayer mobile gaming platform, announced that they are building on Project Darkstar and demonstrated a Texas hold 'em poker game on the iPhone. Chris Melissinos' interview with the Tonnect founders appears at about 3:45 of this video clip.  Check it out!

There were many Project Darkstar related technical sessions delivered, including all those listed in an earlier blog post.  The slide material from most of those presentations is available now to Sun Developer Network members (free to register), including:

• Duke's Dancing Partner: Connecting Handheld Game Consoles with Java™ Technology

• Creating Games with the Open Source Multithreaded Game Engine

• Project Darkstar: A Scalable Application Server for Networked Games, Virtual Worlds, and MMOGs

• Project Darkstar: Open Source Technology Powering New Worlds (video from CommunityOne)

In addition to his technical session, Owen Kellet published a comprehensive daily JavaOne blog and taught a great Project Darkstar Hands On Lab.  Although this primo material is not yet available on the JavaOne website, we'll get it published on the project darkstar website as soon as possible.  Owen also recorded a podcast in the java.net community corner.  No word yet on when that content will be out.

Finally, there was time for fun.  Yes.  The Project Darkstar team at Sun never attends a conference without enjoying a little time out.  This time around, Mike led a group out to a small "pitch and putt" course in Oakland.  Here's the gang preparing to... ah, well, sorta, but not quite, "tee off."   The foursome shown left to right: Jonathan Kaplan, Owen Kellett, Keith Thompson, and Mike Gialis.

An event worth highlighting is that this week the development team released a new version of Project Darkstar v0.9.10 with a more flexible licensing structure. All of the details are provided in this post on the Project Darkstar Community Forums.

It was always our intent to permit developers to redistribute any server side game logic code they wrote under whatever license they chose. Nevertheless, some community members and others considering Project Darkstar for their projects have expressed their concerns to us about the GPL license. We have been listening ...

With the v0.9.10 release we have moved to a new licensing structure that employs GPLv2 with classpath exception for the API classes. The classpath exception is defined here. With this change, our original intent is more explicitly reflected in the license terms. When developers link their server side game logic code to Project Darkstar, they can redistribute the executable without any concern that their code has become "infected" or "tainted" by the GPL license. Of course, any changes to core Project Darkstar server code would still be subject to the GPLv2 license.

We sincerely hope that with this new licensing structure game developers will be much more comfortable building their projects on top of the Project Darkstar platform.

I went to Malmo Sweden two weeks ago to attend the Nordic Game Conference...

I like conferences in general. It's easy to talk directly to developers at conferences -- no need to work through layers of business people first, and I like that.  I actually like talking to business people too, but it's just really nice to be able to get unfiltered questions and reactions and ideas from those who I like most of all: the people in the trenches who actually design and create. And NGC certainly did not dissappoint - the conference was fantastic!

At Malmo this year, I was especially lucky, because at this conference I was able to speak not only with conference attendees, most of whom were just hearing about Project Darkstar for the first time, but also with developers who have lots of experience using the technology, who have created games based on it, and who have shared their expertise in the form of tools, utilities, support, and more, that they have contributed back to the Community.  Those interactions were fantastic, and they were possible because at this conference I participated side-by-side with other  contributors in our Community to collectively present Project Darkstar on the show floor.  That bit -- participating as a peer with others in our Community -- was a first for me, and was the absolute best part of the conference :-)

Emanuel Greisen, Enric Rodriquez Royo, Jennifer Kotzen, Jussi Autio, and Ville Rauma at NGC, 2009

I enjoyed reconnecting with Emanuel Greisen (Gamalocus, Denmark), whom I'd met last year at the Austin GDC, and meeting others face-to-face for the first time, including Enric Rodriquez Royo (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona), Jussi Autio (Tuonela Productions, Finland), and Ville Rauma (Tuonela Productions, Finland).  Together, using commercial games  built on Project Darkstar (Gamalocus' Call of the Kings, Tuonela's Modern Society Online),  community contributions (Enric's AuthsServer service, and Andres Martinez Quijano's Darkstris example game), and some fine writing implements (giveaway pens!), we introduced hundreds of game developers to Project Darkstar, and in the process we got to know each other too. 

Outside of our booth, we bumped into Fredrik Olofsson, (sorry, I didn't get a photo of Fredrik!), who was attending the conference and who shared thoughts about using Darkstar and Unity together.  I also participated in a panel discussion about open source software, which afforded still more opportunities for interaction and learning.

Another highlight of the event was the Nordic Game Awards ceremony.  If you aren't aware of the tremendous game developer talent that is collected in the Nordic region, please take a moment to check out this year's award nominees and winners -- awesome.  And.... yeah, no doubt -- the party was a lot of fun too ;-)

I totally enjoyed the Nordic Game Conference and look forward to going back there again next year.  I'm also *really* pleased at how well doing an event like this as a Community effort worked out, and I'd very much like to see Project Darkstar presented at more events following this model.  If you like the idea too, and would be willing to participate, please let me know -- maybe we can coordinate and do an event near you :-)

Project Darkstar will be all over the place at this year's JavaOne Conference in San Francisco from June 2-5!  Several technical sessions are lined up, a hands on lab is in the mix, some sample games will be shown, Project Darkstar community members from Sun will be on hand, and there may even be a few surprises.  As if all that were not enough, this year's host will be none other than Sun's Chief Gaming Officer, Chris Melissinos, a Project Darkstar veteran who lives and breathes video games and will almost certainly have something to say on the subject.

Here is a quick lineup of what's planned:

Duke's Dancing Partner: Connecting Handheld Game Consoles with Java™ Technology

Max Mu and Liang Xu are a couple of guys who did something pretty cool: They ported Sun's open-source implementation of the CLDC/MIDP platform to both PSP and NDS.  This presentation will show game developers how they can develop multiplayer online games with JavaME and deploy them on these popular handheld game consoles.  They will  also show how they used Project Darkstar to create a simple multiplayer game and explain how to create Project Darkstar game artifacts with the NetBeans IDE.

Project Snowman: Developing a 3-D Multiplayer Game, Using Project Darkstar

Owen Kellett from the Sun Project Darkstar team will lead a hands on lab where participants will walk through the process of building a 3-D, multiplayer, capture the flag style snowball fight game from the ground up.  Built with Project Darkstar, Project Snowman will expose attendees not only to the details of the Project Darkstar API, but also to typical challenges in 3-D game design.

Project Darkstar: A Scalable Application Server for Networked Games, Virtual Worlds, and MMOGs

Owen is also presenting a technical deep dive into Project Darkstar.  He'll provide an overview of the API and cover the typical technical challenges faced when developing scalable networked games and similar applications.  He'll also cover recent advances and current work being done on and with Project Darkstar and the actual design and code of Project Snowman, the 3-D action game built with Project Darkstar.

Our friends from the Project Wonderland team will be presenting: Project Wonderland: Build 3-D Virtual Worlds with Java Technology and Creating Games with the Open Source Multithreaded Game Engine, as well as several other sessions.  Cool stuff!

Rounding things out, there will be some Project Darktar-based game demos in the lounge at the Pavilion and on Thursday, June 4th at 11:30am we'll be hanging out and recording a podcast in the Community Corner also at the Pavilion.  Please stop by and say hello.  If you do decide to come to JavaOne, you might even take advantage of free registration for students and educators.

 Finally, be sure to check out the completely FREE CommunityOne event happening June 1-3.  There will be over 70 technical sessions, including (you guessed it) one on Project Darkstar: Project Darkstar: Open-Source Technology Powering New Worlds presented by Chris Melissinos.  Knowing Chris, this session should be a lot of fun.  Don't miss it!

Make plans now to join the fun at JavaOne and CommunityOne.  Hope to see you there.

Greetings!

I am Karl Haberl, Director of the Project Darkstar initiative at Sun, and this is the inaugural entry of the Project Darkstar team blog.

Those of you familiar with Project Darkstar know that we already have a very active community and many of our community members maintain their own blogs. This blog is intended to be a complementary venue for the Project Darkstar team at Sun to speak on various topics, events and arisings that we believe might be of special interest to the community.

So what will we talk about?

[Read More]