[MUD-Dev] Codebase Ideas

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2000 punitac at prodigy.net wrote:

> Hey List,
> 
> I've been planing on, and started working on (no code 
> yet, just ideas) making a codebase from scratch.  

Me too.  (Well, I have some code, but I'm trying to take kind of a fresh
approach.)

> One idea I had, actully, something 
> someone brought up on another mailing list, was linking 
> muds together.  What I was thinking is there'd be some 
> sortof central server, that would link all the muds 
> together.  

This is how the larger commercial online rpg's work.  They have multiple
"shards" or "worlds" that are linked together.  There's several
different ways this can be done.  I think I'd leave this feature until
other capabilities were in place, as just getting a code up and running
on a single server could be quite a challenge.

> Now, about pfiles, I don't want all the muds to be 
> pretty much the same, except for areas, otherwise I just 
> have pretty much one big stock mud, I'd like Admins of 
> individual muds be able to change things in thier code, 
> for example, one mud could use channeling from the Wheel 
> of Time for magic, while another had magic powers come 
> from rocks, and I'd like to allow this.  To do this, 
> I've decided to give each character two pfiles, one 
> would be for the individual mud, and the second would be 
> a tye of pfile accepted on all the muds connected t the 
> central server.  What would happen is, when player Joe 
> wants to log into to Mud B from Mud A, his second pfile, 
> would be sent to mud B, and at mud B, it would be 
> converted into a pfile that would fit into the mud.

Interesting concept...  This pfile translation seems to be the key, and
I'd love to hear you elaborate on it.  I think once you've got a good
approach for doing the translation, then the rest of it should fall into
place fairly readily.

> hmm, I actully have questions though, so no more making 
> my not really long by talking about things I had in 
> mind.

Check out my wishlist post from last night; I'd be interested in getting
your feedback regarding what you'd like to see in such a server.

> First off, does anyone have advice on how I should do 
> the central server?  What I wanted it to do was have it 
> so every mud when up would be logged into the central 
> server, and always be connected to it.  Any advice on 
> how you guys and girls think I should do this would be 
> great.

Maintaining a peer-server connection is pretty easy to do, actually.
What I would wonder about is what happens if the central machine goes
down, or if the network gets slow.  If all of the servers are intimately
dependent on the central server, and it goes down, then you'll have a
lot of SOL players.  Perhaps it could be done in more of a transactional
approach - where interserver communication only happens when new
information needs to be shared between them?  You could even perhaps
imagine eliminating the central server and instead setting up the
sibling servers to communicate directly with themselves.  

> Also, can you take someone's connection, and transfer it 
> to another mud?  without doing something like making a 
> telnet client just for our mud?  

Hmm, well with plain telnet I don't think this is possible.  You could
have an "agent" interface, that the player logs into and that then
connects to the appropriate server, handling the server-server
transferral.  

I'd actually recommend going ahead and making a full client/server app,
discarding telnet entirely.  This opens up a number of handy potentials,
such as better password protection, client-side caching of information,
and (lo!) adding graphics and sound into the mix.  ;-)

> mud, and while we do have plans for making a client just 
> for our mud, that won't be for a long time. 

Why not let other people make the client?  ;-)

> PS>I'm also sortof wondering how someof you that run graphical muds started out, just cuirious.

Getting the media is actually the hardest part.  Writing the code to
manage the media, while not trivial, isn't as hard.

--
Bryce Harrington
bryce @ neptune.net




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