[DGD] time travel

[bart at wotf.org]

On Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:17:05 -0800, Shentino wrote
> 
> Most likely showstopper:  managing the "4th dimension" in this 
> manner would probably be prohibitively expensive in resource usage,
>  and unless you had a high-end box to run the server on, anything 
> big would probably cause a huge stall as the timeline "reboots"

Not if you can get away with procedural generation of the data.

I've been playing with consistent (and largely unmutable) generated 3d spaces
that allow for 32bit coordinates in all dimensions, and that system has a
potential of adding another 2 dimensions if I'd come up with a useful way to
navigate those. 

It basicly works by seeding a prng (inspired somewhat by the fortuna prng,
using tripple des as block cipher and a 64bit asn as counter) and using the
sequences it produces as 'data'.

> 
> I seriously had doubts it would be possible from an administrative 
> POV, since it would require massive deltas (perhaps not unlike the 
> ones you mentioned wrt. lazily defined PCG), but it does make for an 
> interesting topic.

It seems like a rather challanging idea to implement in a multiplayer game,
interesting for sure.

Bart.

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