VEIL (was: Re: [MUD-Dev] Clients)

[Brandon Gillespie]

I have been meaning to post about this for a while--but just have never
done it.

Anyway, for those not familiar with it, VEIL is something I have been idly
developing for a long time.  Originally I started out by wanting to make
an abstraction of terminal codes for general things (color, cursor
movement, etc) that could be handled by the client and converted to the
local terminal's proper equivalent.  After many rounds of evolution and
input I have ended up with VEIL--which is nothing like what I started out
for (of course, since then the web has come out and the internet has
(finally) started moving away from text based systems). 

In essense, VEIL is a protocol designed so the server can encapsulate all
i/o, tagging it for what it is, and allowing the client to deal with it
appropriately.  MCP is an attempt to do this with specific things--like
editing.  The core of VEIL is loosely based on the Session Control
Protocol from HTTP-NG (an HTTP tangent before 1.1 came out).  Essentially,
it uses a *simple* basic packet system to send messages over a single TCP
connection (so no issues of reliability are involved). Each message is
tied to a different channel (of which there can be 65k of).  Channels are
sortof like process IDs--they come and go as needed and really have no
influence on what they reference.

Assuming you are still following this disjointed discussion, the official
description of VEIL (from the web site) is:

Virtual Environment Interaction Layering Protocol

       VEIL is a system for multiple communication channels over a single
       connection, where each channel can speak its own protocol. It is
       designed as a way to encapsulate and interleave i/o on a Virtual
       Environment server. VEIL is designed as a set of several layers of
       protocols which together form the entire system. VEIL can use
       either a TCP or UDP connection, depending upon which packet
       implementation you use (currently, only TCP is specified, UDP is
       left as a future possibility). 

I recently cleaned up and clarified the specs.  Full info on VEIL can be
found at:

    http://www.cold.org/VEIL/

-Brandon Gillespie