"Project Darkstar" teaser site....

General Discussions
#21

Soome defitions say that other definitions say its a black hole.

Either ofcourse leads to some pretty nasty minorly clever comments if you care to make them.
AFAIAC as the Darkstar Architect, Dark Star is the name of John Carpenter’s student film 8)

Its also, I am told, the name of a classic Dead tune.

But aside from all that.

Project Darkstar is the project under which the Sun Game Server is beign developed. The Sun Game Server is a software technology designed to address many of the problems of developing massively scalable and persistant online game content tdoay. Project Darkstar goes beyond the server itself to address issues of deployment and administration of such content .

Beyond that, wait 2 weeks and we’ll be able to talk a LOT more about it.

#22

Somewhat more on topic…(?)

I am representing IMIlabs, a “first” developer with DarkStar for the launch of our debuting independant game at GDC.

Our experience has been excellent with DarkStar and it is working great right “out of the box”.

It replaced our working but limited networking layer with very little changes to our existing system layered above (actually it was due to our system not been as layer as it should’ve been which was fixed with a few commented out code!)

We are mostly dealing with client to client networking (the game is cartoony combat racing) so throughput and latency are our most important factors, and all is well in our tests so far. I mention this because other traditional Java networking systems (not the raw nio.* stuff but other SE and enterprise stuff) simply are not built for this kind of usage pattern and introduce all kinds of complexities/dependencies and latencies that are not part of this gaming oriented API.

#23

Wurm Online almost became a darkstar game long before I had any idea that’s what it was called.
But of course, sun always stopped talking to us when we asked “so when can we actually see this server thingie?”. :-\

#24

Hey, we love you guys. The fact of the matter is that up til now it really just wasn’t ready for you.

Id say the GDC release is what we always wished we had to give you. And now we do.

I realie it might be a little late for Wurm, but there is always your next project… 8)

#25

I’m sure they wanted to put it out long ago, but as I understand it’s really an issue of allocated internal resources to get it primetime ready.
Last year they got the go ahead to finish developing it into a product, it’s unfortunate that it missed your dev window.
Depending how work and how attached to your networking perhaps after GDC you can look at using it…

#26

Wooo! :smiley:

I have to say, I kinda started fearing you got your funding cut for the project. It’s very nice (and cool) to hear it’s actually happening.
I can’t wait to read some actual details on it. :slight_smile:

#27

I have been following you guys (IMI) for a while. When will your game debut for those who will not attend GDC?

#28

There’s been a small update on the http://community.java.net/games home page… (a big ad : you can’t miss it :wink: )

Don’t know if it’s from today or if it’s been there before…

Lilian :slight_smile:

#29

still another 2 days for our mere mortals.

#30

C’mon now, unlock that website now :slight_smile: It’s today, hehehe

#31

And don’t give us any nonsense about timezones either, it’s already more than half-way through the 22nd here in the UK ;D

C’mon, unlock that website!

#32

hehe, it’s already March 23 here in Tokyo, JP.

#33

Unlocked! Enjoy!

http://www.projectdarkstar.com

-Chris

#34

FYI: Link to “Andrew Leker’s Stomping Grounds” (http://download.java.net/games/SG83.zip) is broken.

Otherwise: Hooray! Can’t wait to look into this further. ;D

#35

Ooo, this looks rather nice. ;D

#36

Stomping Grounds link fixed! Thanks all!

-Chris

#37

What are the terms of use going to be when it’s out of eval stage?

#38

I’m reading the server-api tutorial atm, and I’m a litte surprised to read:

[quote]The SGS is a distributed system. Each host contains an SGS slice that consists of a single stack of
software running in a single process space. Each slice can handle 200-500 users, depending on the game
and the hardware.
[/quote]
Does this mean machine=host so that one computer can only handle 200-500 users? Or can one machine contain multiple slices?
200-500 seems low to me? Look at a small “indie” game like Runescape, handling up to 2000 clients per server (Or is a Runescape server also a cluster?)

#39

I still have to read anything but I’m pritty sure those are estimates.

#40

The PSP giveaway at the Darkstar booth was a brilliant idea. Never thought I’d see a crowd of a hundred game developers yelling “Sun!”