[MUD-Dev] Collecting ideas for a MUD server... (fwd)

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 21 Dec 1999 17:30:30 -0800 
Justin Rogers <justin at mlstoday.com> wrote:

>> From: "Wesley W. Terpstra" <terpstra at iota.dhs.org> 

>> I also wanted to know of what MUDs currently implement any of the
>> following: multithreading, guis, exploiting client processors,
>> pgp certificates about players so their characters can move from
>> one server to another w/o the two servers ever talking directly.

> I don't know about existing muds that support too many of those
> things.  

As mentioned previously, there are several other than myself here in
MUD-Dev working on multi-threaded, GUI-interfaced, client-server,
etc etc etc systems.  There's a wealth of knowledge in the archives
there.  The systems and assumtptions I'm using for Murkle are but
one set of design decisions and assumptions.  Lambert has a
different set, as does Wiggins, as does Dr Cat, as does ...etc.

> The PGP thing is neat and I haven't thought about that one yet.
> It would be neat, but negotiating a character through PGP isn't as
> easy as it sounds.  

PGP in this context purely establishes a "web of trust" and then a
protocol for secure identification (ie auditable and to some extent
guaranteed modulo key trust concerns).  In essence this is exactly
the same thing SSH does with its public key authentication ala
authorixed_keys, just using a PGP wrapper instead of SSH.

The problem which this is that correct authentication is only really
important to the GameAdmin.  In the general and common case the
player really has no interest, and little reason to excercise the
greater care required to secure his secret keys or build or maintain
his web of trust.

Remember: For many, even most of your player base, MUDding is
throw-away time.  Its a better form of vegetating infront of the TV.
If they lose or break their keys or trust web, heck, no worries,
there's always another channel.

> However, using my WORMHOLE plugin you can easily connect multiple
> servers that are all running a WORMHOLE program.  I've used this
> for several space type games I've created with my plugins.

There's also a fair bit of prior art here, from the current
reasonably well documented InterMUD protocol to the original
inter-MUD portals Marcus Ranum put in UnterMUD back in the 1980's.
Stephen White's "YO" object RPC protocol for COOLMUD could also be
extended to be considered a server interconnect protocol (tho its
really not on any arbitrary basis).

--
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                            Internet: coder at kanga.nu
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...


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