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.