Student Views and Reviews: Sun on Campus

Are you bored over your summer break?  Are you just wasting your time at the computer and looking for something fun to do?

Why not try your hand at developing an online game with Project Darkstar!

Project Darkstar is a scalable service platform that was built specifically for online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications.  Project Darkstar will help you avoid a range of serious, yet typical problems such as zone overloading, data corruption, and server under-utilization.  The open-source Project Darkstar also enables developers to support new dimensions of play such as evolving virtual worlds and very large scale battlefields.

There are a wealth of resources available at Project Darkstar for both experienced users and those new to online game architecture.  To begin, there is the Project Darkstar Forums where you can get oriented to the architecture, search for answers, and post your questions.  There is also a Project Darkstar Tutorials wiki that is "stacked to the brim with information to help developers navigate through the entire process of installing, running, and developing applications for Project Darkstar," a great place to get up to speed with recently published experiences of the more seasoned members of the Darkstar community.

There is even a Project Darkstar Hands on Lab from this year's JavaOne.  In the HOL participants learn how to build a 3D, multiplayer, capture-the-flag style snowball fighting game from the ground up using Project Darkstar.  This HOL will quickly get you up to speed with Project Darkstar as it covers installation, running the server and clients, message protocol, managed objects, managed references, channels, message processing, logins, matchmaking, chat and more!

As you can see, you can easily spend the remaining weeks of summer building a super cool game within Project Darkstar to show off to your classmates once the Fall semester begins in a few weeks!