[MUD-Dev] DEV: Peer-to-Peer MUD

[Phil O'Donnell]

Greetings Developers,

I may have brought this up before, but has there ever been any
development of a peer-to-peer graphical MUD.  I theorized and began
some development of this some time ago, but ran out of
energy/time/whatever. The premis is that rather than having one
server holding a large map created by a single person, you have many
small maps being held in many small clients. As you walk around the
seemingly large, contigous, map, you are actually crossing between
servers(clients really).  I believe Ultima does this with some
success on a multi-server system.

One of the most interesting things to me about this is that you
could create a HUGE map only boundried by the number of clients
joined on the network. Maintenance of the network would be handled
gnutella style.

My favorite part is how to map out the world if clients are joining,
leaving, going down, all the time. You could use, and I have with
some success, a random number algorithim, distributed in a spiral,
to dictate what the map should look like. Each number representing a
tile. I have made some very pretty maps using this method.

       9 2 3
       8 1 4
       7 6 5     and so on... 

Granted quests would difficult, though not impossible, but as far as
the other mechanics of the game, as long as every client has the
same set of rules, there should be no problem.

-Philip S. O'Donnell
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