[MUD-Dev] Writing a MUD Server in Visual Basic?

[Dan MacDonald]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matt Owen [mailto:MOwen at Channel4.co.uk]  

> A colleague of mine has recently been talking about writing a MUD
> server in visual basic, as he believes that the speed of current
> machines more than outweighs VBs sluggishness.
 
> I'm not so sure it's possible to write a server in VB, even for a
> small scale world (~64 players), aren't there threading and load
> balancing issues ?
 
> Thoughts or comments anyone ?

I've been playing around with a VB client and server implementation.
I chose VB as I wanted to prototype some server classes and play
around with server implementation.

VB doesn't support multithreading natively, but you can hack it with
Some imported win32 API calls. (There's a sample in MSDN)

While VB defiantly has weaknesses when it comes to large scale
applications, (The absence of any sort of list, queue, tree other
then the Collection type (Which is very slow) is a biggie). It sure
is fast as heck for getting something prototyped and off the
ground. I was able to implement A UDP Wrapper that supported
guaranteed delivery and send chat messages between the server and
clients in about 2 days. (Including a DX interface on the clients)

I'm having fun, but from what I've observed so far I don't think VB
can handle the server side of things without a lot of work and
dependence on some other non VB components.

When I get a little further in development I'll post some
performance Numbers if there's some interest.

Dan MacDonald




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