[MUD-Dev] Wild west (was Guilds & Politics)

[JC Lawrence]

On Fri, 26 Dec 1997 04:45:41 PST8PDT 
Felix A Croes<felix at xs1.simplex.nl> wrote:

> JC Lawrence <claw at under.Eng.Sun.COM> wrote:

>> [...]  To put this into a RL perspective:
>> 
>> Give everybody on the planet a time machine.
>> 
>> The time machine doesn't actually remove the traveller from the
>> present, its more like a pair of goggles inside which they can view
>> the past.
>> 
>> Use of the time machine is uncontrolled.
>> 
>> The time machine can freely travel anywhere in the world once it
>> has moved away from present time into the past.
>> 
>> The time machine can only travel one week or less back in time.
>> 
>> People time travelling cannot affect the past.  They are the
>> proverbial flies on the wall -- they can only receive IO.
>
> How powerful will you be making your database query language?  

I haven't addressed that part yet.  I hope to be able to make detailed
and incisive queries with it.  However, it will not be avilable to
mere users.  Quite likely it will be available externally to the game
only (actually this may be technically required).

>Is
> performing a log query a logged event?  

You are confusing two seperate items here.

  1) The ability of users to use the DB rollbacks to time travel.

  2) The ability of a query language to do structured data extractions
from a DB and its rollbacks.

User players have access only to the first.  Such access will of course
be logged as part of the normal DB logging.  Structured querying of
the DB will not be logged as it is a DB external event.

> Specifically, if a player
> goes through the entire log, does this duplicate the number of log
> entries?

No.  If a player time travels everything he can possibly time-travel,
the only extra data logged for him are notations as to the points and
periods time-watched.

> What if Bubba logged on once a week to record everything done by or
> to Boffo, and kept the logs for longer than a week?

Not a problem.

> What if Bubba publishes his logs after a week?

Not a problem.

> What if Bubba edits his logs before publishing them?

Not a problem as they are now unverifiable and as such worth less than
the electrons taken to display them.

> What if Boffo spams the log with trivia to foil Bubba?

He can't.  He can certainly live a very active MUD life with a very
high event rate, in which case he'll have a large history, but that's
another matter.

> What if Boffo makes his log spamming code generally available?

Ditto.

> What if Boffo implements a cryptographic protocol for communication
> in the mud -- the encryption and decryption is done by his client,
> with some server-side support code?

Excellent!  More power to him.

> What if Boffo makes his crypto code generally available?

I bow in his presence.

> What if people start using Boffo's client for secure communications,
> who are unaware of the server it connects to, or even of the
> existance of your mud in general?

I don't see this as my problem as far as those users are concerned.  I
do see this as my problem as far as the misrepresentation of my
services are concerned.

That all said, areas I haven't examined are the general security
concerns of the time travel feature in-game, or how to represent it
in-game.  First thoughts:

  To time-watch something, the player must first be able to occupy the
viewpoint of that object.  ie You have to go back in time __as__
<whatever> to see what happened to <whatever>.  

  In the general case this means that you have to either control or
own the object that you are going to trace back.  Virtual objects,
such as locations can also be used as long as the player occupies or
owns that location.

  Everything the player sees when time watching will be from the
viewpoint of the time-watched object.  If that object did not see/hear
XXX, then the time watcher won't either (underlieing technical
limitation).  

  Once time watching a player may shift viewpoints to any other object
in the vicinity of the object he is time watching from (tight spatial
limits).  The limits on being able to make that shift are the same: he
must either own or occupy that object in present time, or during the
time watched.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
                                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
----------(*)                        Internet: jc.lawrence at sun.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...