icosilune

Project Darkstar

[Experiments,General] (12.20.08, 10:48 pm)

Okay, I have been wanting to play around with this for a while, and just had the chance to investigate Sun’s fascinating and dramatically named Project Darkstar. Darkstar is actually a game server that is designed for facilitating networked games. It reminds me of just the basic infrastructure behind Multiverse, without anything else whatsoever. For small or versatile projects, that may be a very good thing. I can imagine this plugging into Java Monkey Engine very nicely. I am thinking about using it for some small experimental projects, as well as a potential platform for eventual research.

My research project (fictional adaptation and character simulation) needs to have a flexible, modular, and very very pluggable architecture. I want to be able to use it with other things, and allow others to plug it into their own systems. This is always an ambition in these rough and tumble academic projects, but I really hope to do it right. Developing a client/server system that is multiplayer/multiuser ready is a potentially very good start, as long as the overhead is not too much.

Also, all of Darkstar uses Maven, which I have never used before, but looks to be extremely promising as a powerful project organizational and build tool. I definitely want to try using it for new projects. But, as for Darkstar itself, I’ll play around with it and post updates if I make something interesting.

2 Comments »

  1. Hey,

    Thanks for finding Project Darkstar. I hope its useful to you.

    You can find help getting started with it over at the Project Darkstar forums.

    Be warned that the current Win21 batch file to launch the server is broken. I run it form straight out of Netbeans, other people use eclipse. there are no “plugins” for this but its fairly easy to set up.

    AIUI the team is working now on a vastly improved “out of box” experience which is why they have let the batch file languish. Hopefully that will be out soon.

    Comment by Jeff Kesselman — December 29, 2008 @ 3:00 pm

  2. (Whoops Win21 == Win32 ;) )

    Comment by Jeff Kesselman — December 29, 2008 @ 3:00 pm

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