[MUD-Dev] Distributed PSW design

[Bruce]

Hiya Frank,

Been a while since I've seen you around. :)

Frank Crowell wrote:

> 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.

>From the 'Ask Sweeney' feature on VoodooExtreme:

(For the uninitiated, Tim Sweeney is the lead programmer behind
the Unreal engine.)

http://www.voodooextreme.com/articles/asksweeney.html

Question:

    Speaking primarily of 3D games (though 2D applies as well), is
    there now a standard for storing world data?  Obviously this
    applies to engine development only - you would hope that a
    licensed engine would come with some editor/standard.  Between
    dealing with DirectSound3D/ EAX/A3D and Direct3D or OpenGl, there
    would seem to be some optimum solution.

Tim's response:

    There's no standard for world data.  It would be impossible to
    define one now, since the major engines have very different
    capabilities -- what works well in one engine might not even be
    possible in another engine.  That's true even in games in a single
    genre, like Q3 and UT and Half-Life.

    I expect that some day (long term future) this kind of thing will
    be standardized.  But that won't happen until game engines
    converge on compatible features and representations of data, which
    won't be practical until 3D hardware is perhaps 100 or 1000 times
    faster.  I think you need to hit the "indistinguishable from
    reality" criteria before you get standardization.  Any attempts to
    standardize too early are bound to fail, just like VRML failed --
    because clever developers can easily do much better by avoiding
    the standard, and using their own special-case techniques.

    A comparable situation is music synthesis.  In the early days, all
    synthesizers were parameterized oscillators and circuits; so one
    synthesizer's parameters were totally incompatible with another's.
    Back in those days, 64K was "a lot of RAM" -- that was 15 years
    ago or so.  Music and sound became standardized when everyone
    moved to digital sampling; that occurred when 4MB was considered
    reasonable.  Since good digitally sampled sound is 100%
    indistinguishable from real-world sound (the criteria for a data
    format being 100% acceptable to everyone), everyone converged on
    the same techniques, and moved to .wav files.

---------------------------------

Just some thoughts from someone else on that matter.

 - Bruce
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev