[MUD-Dev] Seamlessly Distributed Online Environments

[Frank Crowell]

From: "Draymoor (Philip Loguinov)" <draymoor at cloud9.net>

> People connect to the central database, the city, and can wander
> about. If they enter a building in that city, they automaticly
> connect to the server that runs the node that is that
> building. They then communicate with that server, obeying whatever
> rules the server's writer decides to implement.

> 3 questions:

>   -Is anyone already working on something like this?

There has been some attempts to create systems where you walk
through a portal and you are in another room or world and it is
running on some other server.  There has been no real attempt to
govern these worlds through a protocol except for the URL.

This topic was discussed many years ago in one of the mud newsgroup,
but it never seemed to generate much interest.

I am playing around with a related concept of distributed everything
through software buses or adaptors.  CORBA is too heavy-weight for
me, but I found an interesting software bus called Ivy that uses
text as its protocol basis.

>   -Would people be interested in creating their own node servers?

It's really hard to know.  Muds have traditional been independent
islands.  Even the large Xerox-based LambdaMOO was only one system.
All the other LambdaMOO servers were independent servers with just a
communication room as a link to give the illusion of a common room.

>   -What problems would you foresee in creating something like this?

The hard part is getting the other servers in the network and
keeping the links from going stale.  Maybe you could cover up the
stale links in the core city node just be having new construction
projects. You also may have some real estate and zoning problems.
For example, I want to create a movie theater with a projector room,
seating, bathrooms, and a back alley where interesting things
happen.  This is essentially Duke Nukem.  In the core city you would
have to have the shell of the building and possibly an alley so that
if you went through the alley you would still end up in the Duke
Nukem server.

Some variation of this how future 3D muds will be made. The worlds
will be too large, too complex for a single server and too expensive
for individuals to own anything larger that a small cpu cluster.

Finally, the central server goes away for a hybrid model
client-server/P2P.

maddy
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