Sun Microsystems Project Darkstar

Project Darkstar is an open source project administrated by Sun Microsystems.

It can be summed up best as follows:

“Project Darkstar is a software platform that simplifies the development of horizontally scalable servers for online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications. Its revolutionary design will eliminate serious problems like zone overloading, data corruption, and inefficient server utilization, while enabling new dimensions of play such as evolvable virtual worlds and very large scale battlefields.” – Project Darkstar website (www.projectdarkstar.com)

The ETC project “Darkstar” will be making a number of games over the duration of the semester in order to test drive the Project Darkstar system and providing feedback to Sun about what is good, what is not so good and how we think they can further improve it.

Further, we will be providing the Project Darkstar server and a python/Panda3d client interface to the students currently taking Building Virtual Worlds in order to get more perspectives and additional feedback on the system. Further we will also learn how easy it is to teach to others, an important usability factor in the real world.

Out last goal is integrating Project Darkstar into the Panda3d to provide the engine with networking capability.