[MUD-Dev] On Lockless Threading and X/Open XA

[Patrick Dughi]

On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, KevinL wrote:
> 
> claw at kanga.nu wrote:
> > On Tue, 01 Aug 2000 00:50:11 -0700 
> > Bruce  <bruce at puremagic.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > I suspect an interesting analysis could be made of the way that
> > > backend design changes as you scale from supporting 50 to 500 to
> > > 5000 to 50k players in a single world.
> > 
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > 
> > What if the arbitrarily distributed form of InterMUD and portals
> > were as ubiquitous and well defined as HTTP?
> 
> Sadly, every time this sort of thing has come up, world balance issues have 
> killed it - at least, in every forum I've seen.  How do you mix (drawing three 
> examples from mid-air) Arctic, Legend, and Archaea into one globule of a 
> universe?  What exactly would be worth carrying from place to place - 
> characters?  items?  gold?

	That's the problem, as each mud maintains it's own individual
code and stance, it will be impossible to maintain proper balance and
conversion ratios, especially for those things which exist on one site and
not the other.  Add in the trust factor (if you are an admin on one mud,
what would stop you from generating uber characters to be sent to the
other), and multiple sites and you have a problem that's insurrmountable.

	I think the correct thing to do would be to have portals between
muds - where the _character_ is different and unique (and generated by
_that_ mud's standards, incidentally).  In essense, if you step through a
portal, you quit one mud, and your connection is silently transfered to
the other mud.  The only real information that is really required is
character name and password - for most systems (disregarding naming
conventions, account-based logins, etc). If the character doesn't exist on
that other mud yet, put them through the creation sequence, and assign the
password (i'd recommend both sites using encryption, and then just pass
the encrypted pword over and assigning that directly).  

	The other way would only work if you had games which were 100%
static in nature, and I don't see that happening, unless you control all
such games in a cluster, and you're just using a distributed server setup.
	
> Actually, my take on this is intermud communications - both instant and
> stored - would be worthwhile (ala "darius at moebius" for chat or mudmail). 

http://www.imaginary.com/protocols/intermud3.html
	or
http://mud.stack.nl/intermud/

	Might be worth a look if you're curious.

	In my experience it seems to be difficult and unstable to say the
least, and while this likens it to a set of irc servers with poor
interconnection, you're bereft of many of the common functions of irc
channels.  Seems easier just to piggyback an actual irc connection to the
mud (though most do ident checking to disallow multiple users with the
same user id from the same machine).

						PjD




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