[MUD-Dev] Languages for MUD drivers

[Cynbe ru Taren]

Greg Miller <gmiller at classic-games.com> noted:

| Ian Macintosh wrote:
| > Distributed processing support can be handled by running multiple
| > processes and interconnecting them.  I've always thought that this is
| > a better way of handling large systems and a large number of users.
| > ie, segment areas (zones) onto different servers and link them.
| 
| I've always thought this was an extraordinarily poor way to handle it...
| Unless you have a truly enormous number of players, don't you end up
| shifting areas from server to server as players and groups move, in
| order to achieve load balancing? Wouldn't event-based distribution work
| much more cleanly?

This may depend on what you're trying to achieve and how you're doing it.

In the Muq Micronesia worldkit, what I've done is have each user
thread cache information about the current room.

User-user interactions such as pages travel direct from user server
to user server, without touching the location server (unless it
happens to be one of the two user servers):  The server for the
shared current location can actually go down without players in
the room noticing it for some time (say, until they try going to
another room on that server).

My background is tinyMUCK social muds -- where player motion is
relatively rare -- and my design trajectory is towards procedurally
defined 3D avatar worlds, where the area description is quite
compact:  Considerably more caching and/or a different design might
be called for in combat-oriented worlds emphasizing rapid travel
between areas defined by large amounts of state.

 Cynbe



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