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!!