Darkstar Developer Challenge Contest Winners
Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced the winners of the Project Darkstar Developer Challenge, a contest for independent developers and students intended to encourage and recognize innovation and participation in the Project Darkstar community. From a diverse pool of entries, the judges selected grand prize and runner up winners in both the student and non-student divisions.
In the non-student division, Andres Martinez Quijano won the grand prize for his entry, Darkstris, a multiplayer, cooperative online tetris game. “It’s a lot of fun, easy to get running, and a great starting point for online game developers using Project Darkstar,” said the judges. In the student division, Esko Luontola won the grand prize for his entry, Transparent References, which make it possible to write applications for Project Darkstar without the need to manually create and use managed references in the application code. The judges commented that this entry “showed a lot of creativity in developing a solution of high technical merit potentially very useful to the community.”
The runner up prize in the student division went to Enric Rodriguez Royo for his entryAuthserver, a small API which enables MMO developers to set up a customizable authentication server for their online games. “This is a very nice solution which will have a lot of immediate benefit to the community,” said one of the judges. Jonathan Wagner won the runner up prize in the non-student division for his entry Darkstar AS3, a pure actionscript client for Project Darkstar. The judges declared this entry “critical to the community.”
All four winners subject to verification of eligibility will receive passes to the 2009 Game Developer Conference (GDC) and are invited to present their work with the Project Darkstar team at a GDC session, emphasizing how and why their projects demonstrate the capability and enhance or extend Project Darkstar open source technology.
Each applicant is encouraged and many have had time to create an open source project for their entry and list it on the Projects Page of the Project Darkstar website. In addition, the Developer Challenge Contest page has been created which includes information about all the entries and a link to a downloadable .zip file for each one. Please check out all of the entries and start putting them to good use in your own projects.
Sun Microsystems extends its sincere thanks to all participants in the Project Darkstar Developer Challenge. It was great to receive such a terrific response from this diverse community and discover the range of Project Darkstar related development being undertaken. Since each entrant agreed to share their entry, the entire community now gains an opportunity to reap the rewards of this development. For that, the entire Project Darkstar community is grateful.
