[MUD-Dev] Re: Cyberspace in the 21at century-- (long)

[Frank Crowell]

Eric Rhea wrote:

> It does seem that the direction that the computer industry is
> heading is P2P, but this does not necessarily mean that the gaming
> industry will follow soonafter or even dominate this area.

Probably true for the mainstream companies.  This model suggests an
open, cooperative world and I don't believe the game companies are
ready for that.  Certainly the VRML community and VR in general has
been very receptive to this for a long time.  I would also tag
Epicgames (Unreal) as a possible mover in the P2P side of things,
although it also looks like they are beefing up their client/server
programming.

> So maybe someone figures out a way to create a secure
> transaction/trust environment for P2P. The designers of the system
> would need some sort of versioning control. It could be possible to
> introduce a version-checking method into the software and then dump
> it into the bit pool, but what of those agents that aren't
> necessarily connected? Sounds like the telephone game, let's get
> back to that in a sec.

When object or attributes have value, then the possiblity of cloning
or attribute tampering is real.  We have already seem cases like this
with our c/s model in the dupe bugs.  This is one of the reasons why I
believe that some kind of digital object security system has to be
devloped.  LEDO (limited edition digital object) seems to be a
dead-end and I don't know of anyone doing something similar.

> A solution would be to mix a little of both worlds, I think, but the
> scale of complication increases. P2P along with the tested-and-true
> C/S model might prove advantageous. This might provide developers
> some level of control over what is happening. Might.

It's possible that a person could build a whole business out of some
trusted server network This is sort of a wierd idea as I think about
it.

Maybe not so wierd though.  A growing business is network storage
where your content is out there on the network, but you really don't
know where and don't care.  Part of network storage also includes
providing duplication and backup services, general security, and data
integrity.


frank

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