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.