[MUD-Dev] Semi Graphical Muds

[Felix A. Croes]

Bruce <bruce at puremagic.com> wrote:

> Christopher Allen wrote:
>[...]
> > We had spec'ed a transport layer called Ellis, which was designed by
> > Felix Crowes (author of DGD) and Par Winzell (of Skotos). It created
> > a secured, authenticated, encrypted connection, onto which a host of
> > private channels are automatically multiplexed in UDP and TCP. On
> > top of it would be an action protocol, providing XML support, XML
> > tag compression/aliasing, a naming scheme for channels and a
> > subscription/registration service for client/server module pairs. On
> > top of that would be a client specific scheme for displaying
> > information into that particular client.
>
> Have you looked at BXXP, XML-RPC, or SOAP?
>
> BXXP (http://www.bxxp.org/) seems like it'd be the most interesting
> from your description.
>
> I think a world where I can write a quick program using XML-RPC and
> query some bit of server state (assuming that I have the correct
> security privileges, etc.) would be very interesting.  But the key to
> getting there probably lies in some combination of:
>
>   * Widely deployed and standardized protocol
>   * Standardized and documented APIs on top of that protocol.
>   * A good number of servers which support it.

Contrary to some other posters in this thread, I am not all that
interested in using or creating a standard protocol.  I expect that the
mudders of the future will download their client before playing -- with
perhaps a client upgrade before every new session -- and the initial
download protocol has already been well established on the internet.

Ellis was designed to be a low-level multiplexing protocol with
connection recovery and security; Skotos necessarily went beyond
that, but personally I doubt that I will ever use XML.  The point
of Ellis, for me, is that I have a communication protocol which I
can use for all my future mud projects.  I have no hope, or indeed
intention, that it will be used by any mud which does not build
upon DGD.

Regarding higher level protocols, in my view, each mud ought to
have its own protocol, and its own client. :-)


>[...]
> > We don't intend that Ellis (or whatever it is renamed when it
> > becomes http friendly) to be proprietary, so we'll be glad to share
> > it with anyone that wants to use it. I think that Felix wants to
> > build it into the base DGD, so there will be a non-commercial
> > version of it available.
>
> That's a good thing to hear. :)

I won't build Ellis into DGD itself, but once it is done, I will release
a mudlib and open source client that make use of it.  The changes to DGD
will mostly involve support for secure key exchange, authentication and
encryption.

Regards,
Felix Croes
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