Project Darkstar is an open source software framework that simplifies the development of scalable online game servers. It was created by Sun Microsystems Laboratories to address limitations of traditional game server architectures. Project Darkstar allows tasks to be distributed across multiple servers, enabling massive scalability. It provides a simple programming model and is freely available to developers as an open source project.

1. Project Darkstar Ahmed Mohamed Saeed Sun Campus Ambassador [email_address]

2. Project Darkstar In Detail What is Project Darkstar? Agenda What To Do/Where To Go Demonstrations Starting your online game

3. What is Project Darkstar? “ Project Darkstar is a software infrastructure that simplifies the development of game servers that take full advantage of today's multi-core processors, delivering a new generation of scalability to online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications. Project Darkstar was created by Sun Microsystems Laboratories, is freely available to all, and is today advanced as an open source project by the Project Darkstar community.”

4. What's a Game Server? Everyone and Everything Participating on the Network Server-side logic of online games Connected to player/client-side logic via the internet Usually responsible for: Maintaining critical player data and shared game state

5. Coordinating player communications and interactions

6. Interfacing with billing and transaction systems

7. Cheat detection & correction Deployed across one or more physical server machines May serve thousands, even millions, of players

8. Large game datacenters may utilize thousands of servers

9. Current Game Server Architectures Everyone and Everything Participating on the Network Product of pragmatic evolution loosely knit collection of self-contained “zone” servers Don't scale well are mono-threaded

10. maintain most game state in memory

11. zones are fixed in number, variable in 'size' game's scalability limited by scalability of zone server(s)

12. zones are hard-to-size, so servers are utilized inefficiently Are inflexible and costly to create and maintain are homegrown...

13. or, based on proprietary technology

14. Project Darkstar: Designed to Scale Everyone and Everything Participating on the Network Tasks fixed in size (small), variable in number scalability limited only by number of available cores or by extension, in the future, by number of servers small tasks use servers efficiently Distributed interactions enabled (necessarily) Unbounded gameplay

15. Bonus: data persistence Data integrity intrinsically assured

16. Enables evolvable virtual worlds Easy to create and maintain Simple programming model

17. Everyone and Everything Participating on the Network Project Darkstar: A Developer's View Project Darkstar Core Services DataManager TaskManager ChannelManager AppContext ChannelListener ClientSessionListener AppListener