Sun Open Sources Project Darkstar

Sun Microsystems Laboratories announced yesterday the release of the code for Project Darkstar, the MMOG software it announced in March 2007. Binaries have been available for some time, but this release includes the source for version 0.9 under the GPLv2 license.  Darkstar is built to be scalable and flexible for building MMOGs, allowing programmers to code for multiple machines as if they were only working on one, but it's not just about games. Project Darkstar, combined with Project Wonderland, makes the foundation for MPK20, Sun's internal virtual workplace software. While this version only runs on one computer, limiting scalability, it reportedly can host 5,000-6,000 players.

In yesterday's podcast,  "Project Darkstar's Programmer Dream," Jim Waldo, distinguished engineer and principal investigator at Sun Labs, said

In terms of the massive multiplayer online gaming, most of the companies that are doing that have rolled their own, and what they're finding is that they don't scale particularly well. World of Warcraft has done a very good job, but they've done it by what's called geographic localization, where any particular region of the game is associated with a particular server. [...] Linden Labs is having many publicized problems with scaling the Second Life platform, because once again, they're game people, they're not scaling people. In terms of the server platform itself, IBM has made some noises about having something like this, but as far as we know, Darkstar is pretty much the only general-purpose game in town.