[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: The purpose of MUDding?

[Matt Chatterley]

On Fri, 1 Aug 1997, Brandon Van Every wrote:

> > From: Matt Chatterley <root at mpc.dyn.ml.org>
> >  
> > You can have quite a few players hopping about over PPP without lagging
> to
> > hell FYI - my personal record is probably 10 on any kind of server, over
> > 28.8 PPP, and on a P90 (NexGen) with 8 megs of ram on linux. This was not
> > a limit because of resources - it was a limit because that was the amount
> > of people who actually showed up at the same time.
> 
> Really?  Did you have to do anything "special" to achieve this?  Or did you
> just start up some MUD server without any fuss whatsoever?  What server did
> you use?  Do some servers have bottlenecks in them which would impede PPP
> performance?

Nothing special really. The server was PennMUSH in the first case, but the
same is repeatably with Mudos v21 running Caffeine. It DOES depend on how
much text you send out - this was with upto 10 fairly active players
chatting, but not reading huge files etc. The only sort of bottle necking
likely to hit you is just that - volume of informatio sent client <>
server.
 
> > How would you populate it? Perhaps by some sort of 'automatic' or
> > 'multiple login' technique - or perhaps players would do it themselves.
> If
> > you put no restriction on multiple logins, players will probably start to
> > use them at any rate - and anonymity adds an interesting edge to this.
> 
> Anonymity.  That's an interesting notion.  I wonder if partial anonymity is
> a precondition to the worlds I imagine.  Most MUD taboos are about the fear
> of your persona being subverted/destroyed.  Psychically, people really hate
> it when you screw with their sense of self.  But no persona, no fear?

Absolutely.

Regards,
	-Matt Chatterley
	http://user.itl.net/~neddy/index.html
"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's
	mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." -George Orwell