Project Darkstar

Project Darkstar was an open source MMOG middleware solution written in Java. Project Darkstar began as a personal project of Jeff Kesselman in 1999. It later became a research project at Sun Microsystems, and aimed to "help developers and operators avoid a range of serious, yet typical, problems associated with massive scale online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications today, including zone overloading, data corruption, and server underutilization."

Project Darkstar began as a personal project of Jeff Kesselman in 1999 while he was the Senior Game Integration Engineer at the Total Entertainment Network. In 2004, Sun's Game Technology Group was formed, and at that time Mr. Kesselman brought the third iteration of the project into Sun where it was dubbed the Sun Game Server. (The SGS moniker survives to this day in the package names of the Project Darkstar Server.)

Mr. Kesselman worked on the third version for a year as a solo project in Sun, debuting an early version at the Game Developers' Conference that year. Following the reorganization of the Software CTO's office in 2005, the project was moved to Sun Labs under Sun Labs Director Karl Haberl. Karl increased the man-power, adding Seth Proctor and Dan Ellard as co-researchers, as well as contractors James Megquier and Sten Anderson. This team delivered what is now known as the Early Access version, the first working server, for GDC 2005.

On February 2, 2010, in the wake of the purchase of Sun by Oracle, Jim Waldo posted on the "Project Announcement" forum that "Sun Labs engineering effort is no longer being applied to Darkstar development". A number of members of the Sun Labs team and a number of members of the Darkstar community have gone on to work on the RedDwarf Server as a successor to Darkstar.

When a Project Darkstar server implementation is run, it either starts a new network or joins one that is currently running. All networks contain clients, server implementations, a Project Darkstar stack on which the server implementations run, and several meta-service nodes that handle traffic between each node in the server stack. A server implementation is a user created program written with the Project Darkstar API. The clients include all client-side applications and games that are connected to a game server in the network.