[DGD] Letting the players code stuff

[Noah Gibbs]

  This is something I thought about long and hard.  The short answer is that if
you don't want players to be able to crash your MUD in some way, you're going
to need to create an interpreted language within DGD.

  The major concern is resource exhaustion -- you don't want player code to be
able to steal all the machine resources and starve the MUD itself.  DGD has
excellent protection to prevent this for disk space and processor load, and
also does an amazing job with regards to security.  Unfortunately, if you're
directly executing LPC code, there's no way to prevent player code from
allocating too much RAM and starving your MUD.  To do that, you're going to
need to add a layer to check that in some way, which basically means coding an
interpreted language.

  This language can look exactly like LPC if you want, though you'll need to
figure out what the failure mode is when they allocate a new data structure and
suddenly their code dies with an error of some kind...

--- Kurt Nordstrom <kurt at blar.net> wrote:

> Okay, so I'm back to playing with Melville again.  Yes, I know it is old
> and not under current development.  I know it doesn't take full advantage
> of DGD.  However, it is simple, and makes the most sense to my ex-Amylaar
> mindset.  Phantasmal was awesome, but my brain is too full to fully grok
> it right now.
> 
> So...I'm toying with the idea of a RP environment mud.  Sort of like what
> people use a mux/mush for, but with code that doesn't look like line
> noise.
> 
> One feature of mush/mux/moo is that players can, more or less, safely code
> their own objects and commands.  This is something I'd like to allow.  My
> thoughts run along these lines:
> 
> Rewire the security model to give editing permission to players within a
> directory of their own.  Within this directory they could have a /cmds
> subdirectory that they could use to write their own commands.  They could
> also possibly code their own objects within their directory.
> 
> Since it is a roleplaying environment, and not a "Kill the monster, get
> XP" sort of thing, the threat of them coding themselves a superweapon is
> not so much a concern.  What is a concern is somebody coding something
> that breaks the game or messes up the experience for other players.
> 
> Anybody have any ideas/considerations about how I'd go about doing this? 
> Any caveats or pitfalls or what-the-hell-are-you-thinking's?
> ___________________________________________
> https://mail.dworkin.nl/mailman/listinfo/dgd
> 





       
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