[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[Amanda Walker]

On 12/12/02 10:18 AM, bradley newton haug <brad at faithanddisease.com> wrote:

> If you still think this is a 'difficult new thing', I suggest you
> hire some more network engineers and fewer designers.  Now I'm not
> saying this is the case, but whenever I see marketing or sales
> personnel in the retail shrink-wrap industry waving their hands
> and saying how hard something is, [...]

Heh.  Well, I've been saying it's hard as well, and it's not because
I'm a marketing person for a game company.  It's because I've been a
network engineer for over 20 years, and have actually built
high-reliability, timing-critical distributed systems.  They aren't
new, and they aren't magic, but they are difficult.

> It's code, it's network, it's a state sync machine, I'd wager a
> guess every single algo I've used in my engine has been used
> before.

It's code, it's network, it's a *bunch* of state machines, it's
delay and congestion, it's failover, it's asynchronous updates to
distributed state, it's figuring out how to keep things consistent
without having to lock or sync them together, it's how to keep
running when presented with conditions that "can't happen", ...

It's not like building a distributed database application.  It's
more like building a streaming media distribution network or an ISP.

This is especially true for commercial implementations--if people
are paying you $10 a month, they think they own you.  You have to
provide a much higher level of service and a much lower
response/repair time than if you're doing it for free.

Amanda Walker


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