[MUD-Dev] Distributed PSW design

[Frank Crowell]

Stephane Bura wrote:

> Since I first heard of Neverwinter Nights, I've been thinking about
> distributed PSWs where no servers kept the correct global world
> state.

Actually I had also concluded that small, distributed, locally run
muds is the major theme for the 21st century.  True, the virtual
worlds newsgroup many years ago tried to address the issues involved
with such a model.  At the time the technology was still crude and the
internet was mostly an empty landscape.

For most of my technical career I have helped take big things and make
them smaller and more of them.  I have also posted over the years on
the topic of personal muds and the portable mud character or avatar.

There are still technical problems to overcome for a distributed
world, but I don't believe it really involves any new technological
breakthrough.  All the pieces are in place -- some may need to be
reshaped.  We have amazing 3D engines readily available
(http://www.genesis3d.com and http://www.crystalspace.org for two
examples of free Open Source engines), we also have demonstrated the
lasting power of persistent online worlds. Unreal/Quake/Half-life have
demonstrated that there is a community who want to build their own
worlds.  And there are now practical examples of how to build
multiuser servers.

If I understand things correctly, the Napster model (or a variant of
it) may be the right way to go.  There will be a need for some kind of
registration/coordination servers.  The issues here include how do you
find worlds and get the world contents.  Also how do you preserve
object scarcity -- if needed.  Sometime ago I mentioned LEDO (limited
edition digital object) that Sega was working on.  As far as I know,
it is still an internal system.  But something like LEDO could be the
way that objects would be registered.  I believe that Unreal or Shogo
has an object registration hook but I don't think it is intended for
external object registration.

Probably the hardest issue to deal with -- beside latency of course --
is area loading.  CD and DVD distribution made sense for a limited
number of worlds.  Doesn't make sense for the 21st century mudverse
where worlds come and go and continuously change.  MPEG-4 was
developed to help address this issue for the VRML community and of
course it includes streaming technology.  At Streaming Media West I
saw a couple of companies demonstrating various versions of how they
are streaming games..

For the mudverse to support a billion people, it will also need
standard tools/objects/formats.  Once again, the FPS (first-person
shooter) community has done a decent jobs of developing tools and
sharing levels and objects.  The objects are sort of limited, but fits
their world-view.  There will need to be Universal Avatars.  A good
place to start is with the definition that the VRML community has come
up with for their avatars with some modification because the VRML
world is always 3D.

On so on.  This is only the beginning...

frank



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