[MUD-Dev] Net protocols for MUDing (was: Moore's Law sucks)

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 01:41 AM 2/24/98 +0000, I personally witnessed Chris Gray jumping up to
say:
>[Chris L:]
>
>:The key feature of TCP which I'd remove would be the error correction. 
>:Given a predictive client its both unecessary and counter-productive.
>
>Only to a certain extent. Sure, you can probably cruise over a bit of lost
>data in graphics or audio output. Missing some text from the middle of
>a paragraph could be a bit shocking to the average user, however. Also,
>the channel back from the client to the server should not lose any of
>the user's input. 

I'd also like to point out that error control is very much appreciated out
here in areas where line noise is not a thing of the past. Something like
70% of the US is still using 50's era phone switching equipment once you
get outside of the major metropolitan centers; when you think about it,
that's an awful lot. Not to mention all of the overseas players, who
probably don't have the world's best internet infrastructure. In the BBS
era, all of us out here would get huge amounts of line noise that made it
impossible to do much of anything. Now all we get is a slowdown in our
transfer rates. I sort of like that. I'm not fond of the idea that someone
out there wants to get rid of it because he doesn't need it. 

To rant a bit, would you like to do away with wheelchair ramps and Braille
on elevator buttons, too? There are thousands of things in the world that
most of us will never need. Yeah, you can do away with error correction, or
just about anything else that *you* don't need. And in the end, you can
tell the people who complain that they're just pathetic and backwards and
should have better equipment, can't you? I mean, shouldn't all of your
players have internet connections and computer capabilities that equal or
exceed yours? And if the player happens to live in an area that might not
be as populated as a major urban center or a university town, then it
really is his fault that the phone company has absolutely no clue what he's
talking about when he asks for frame relay pricing, isn't it? 

There's a balance that needs to be struck. I agree, limiting your audience
is inevitable, but could we try not to do it by callously disregarding
things that aren't doing us much good but aren't actually costing us
anything either? Let's limit the audience with things that the user will
*like*, okay? When you have something that the user can upgrade to get
involved in, it's called 'driving the industry'. Games are largely
responsible for this. I bought a 486 to replace my 286 specifically because
Doom was coming out. I upgraded to 64 megs to support more editing tools
for Doom. I upgraded my sound system for Dungeon Keeper. The colored
lighting in Quake II convinced me to go out and spend far too much money on
a new video card. If I'm going to get something for upgrading, I'll do it.
But what you're proposing means that I need to move. That's not really
feasible. 

Okay, so I could go out and petition the phone company to spend several
million dollars just so I cen get better performance from your game. (Yeah,
that's going to happen.) But no matter how you try to convince the public
otherwise, the players are going to think the line noise and dropouts are
the fault of YOUR game. After all, they looked at a room and they got
garbage. They got into a fight with a mob, and lost four attacks due to
line noise. Will you still have players? Undoubtedly. But when all is said
and done, you've told a huge number of people that they just can't play
your game. Isn't that a little rude?