Interested in DarkStar

[Badmi]

I have been thinking about writing a MMO game for a while and have recently heard of DarkStar. After looking over the documentations I believe that DarkStar may be able to cut down the devilment time tremendously. There where a few questions about DarkStar that I have been unable to fined an answer to in the documentation:

1)   If I start developing the application now will I be able to continue devliping it with DarkStar once DarkStar is finished or would I have to pay Sun to use DarkStar as a devilment tool? I would have no problem paying sun royalties but my economic plan would make it impossible to pay until the game becomes profitable wich would take months if it ever happened.
2)   Dose DarkStar handle president storing of GLOs or am I responsible for storing them?
3)   How much bandwidth dose DarkStar require? What is the overhead of sending data?

[endolf]

Hi

OK, i'm not on the DS team, but I'll try to help out

2) DS does indeed handle the persistance of your GLOs, there is nothing you need to do to enable it. DS 'just does it'

3) DS itself requires almost nothing itself. Without you writting anyhing down the channels, i don't belive it does anything after initial log on. After that, it's up to you. The larger your network messages become, the less the overhead is, but the more the bandwidth need.
It's no different to custom code or even raw TCP/UDP in that respect. The overhead is measured in bytes per message, not kbytes, but I couldn't tell you how many, but my guess from what I've seen is in the order of 10-20.
If you thrash the system with messages of around 20 bytes of your own game data, then you will be wasting 50% of your bandwidth, but if you bunch them up to a few hundred bytes or a couple of k, then the overhead becomes alot less significant, exactly like tcp.

HTH

Endolf

[Jeff]

 ( 1 ) So this is am improtnt question and one we working rigth now with management to answr. I hope to have a solid answer in a few months but in the meantime elt me assure you that from the originator of the system up to the highest technicallevel in Sun, we believe that a key value Darkstar can and will bring is as a service offering that takes away that upfront cost so that small developers liek yourself *can* do MMO projects.  Unfortunately I cannot *promise* exactly what that service offering ill look like until we finish this part of the business cycle, which is a coupel of months from being done.

(2) What the Endolf said

(3) What the Endolf said, with one comment.  The transport in the Darkstar stack (the actual code that moves data between client and server, or between clients) is pluggable.  What this means if, if you found you were pumping too much data for your cleint connections (the critical last mile) you could, if you wanted, just repalce that part of the stack with one that did a custome comrpession.

Im working on getting the stack extension SDK (the part that explains all that) out in the next few weeks.  (I was targeting J1 but E3 kinda got in the way.)

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Badmi]

Im working on getting the stack extension SDK (the part that explains all that) out in the next few weeks. 

What is the stack extension SDK?

[Jeff]

The stack extension SDk gives you docs and everything you need for writing code to plug into the vrious pluggable parts of the system, such as the UserManager/UserManagerCllent, Validator, etc.