Saturday, February 13, 2010

Goodbye Project Darkstar, Hello RedDwarf!

I was saddened to learn tonight that the game server that was being developed by Sun, called Project Darkstar, has become a causality of the Oracle acquisition. Oracle has decided to pull the plug on the project and, while I cannot say I am terribly surprised, I am quite disappointed. Had I been paying attention to my InfoQ emails I probably would have noticed sooner but instead I found out by trying to browse the forums and being told I'm now banned from them. Ack!

For those who don't know, Project Darkstar was an application server tailored towards large scale online gaming and virtual worlds. It was kind of like what the java enterprise servers do for business applications but engineered from the ground up for game programming (e.g. ultra low latency). It handles the back end server concerns of an MMORPG type application so the developers can focus on making a kick ass game.

Or a really crappy web based chat room where you can punch people like what I was working on when I found Darkstar about a year ago.

I am not a game developer by any stretch of the imagination but that is what made the idea of writing a game fun for me. While researching what it takes to support the server side of an on-line multiplayer game I stumbled upon Darkstar and found it to be exactly what I was looking for. It solved the back end problem for me, was agnostic towards the client technology, was open source with an active community and backed by Sun to boot. Perfect! I can buy into this and futz around with stupid CSS tricks, AJAX, servlets, etc. to my hearts content.

And of course Oracle decides to yank the project.

Fortunately for a fella like me, and many of the more serious game developers who invested time and money into Darkstar I'd imagine, one of the Darkstar developers, Owen Kellett, has alread created a community fork of the project called RedDwarf.

This is very cool to see. Same code, new name, thank you Owen and everyone who has helped get RedDwarf going!