Talk:Project Darkstar

Some missing history:

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 2000, Mr. Kesselman came to Sun from 15 years in the game industry and joined the Sun JDk performance Tuning Team. In 2004 he was transferred the newly formed Software CTO's Game Technology Group. At that time he 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, where Seth Proctor came on as a co-researcher along with Daniel Ellard as well a contractors James Mecguire and Sten Anderson. This team delivered what is now known as the Early Access version, the first working server, for GDC 2005.

Following this, James Waldo and his team became interested in the technology and technical lead was handed over to him to pursue. At about the same time, the name Project Darkstar was chosen and the open source community launched.

Mr. Kesselman moved to a more outward directed role as "Chief Instigator" and eventually left Sun to go back to building games as the Chief Technical Officer of Rebel Monkey Inc. Rebel Monkey's online paltform, The Monkey Wrench, was built using Project Darkstar and Mr. Kesselman remains an active member of the Project Darkstar community.

The Project Darkstar Server as it exists today is the fruit of the combined labor and ingenuity of a great many talented and creative engineers, all of whom are to be credited with solving critical problems in its ongoing evolution. Its basic design and goals, however, remain fundamentally the same as originally conceived by Mr. Kesselman in 1999.