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