[MUD-Dev] Distributed virtual worlds (Was NEWS: Why Virtual Worlds are Designed By Newbies - No, Really (By R. Bartle))

[Tom Gordon]

Sean wrote:

> On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Yannick Jean wrote:

>> I may be missing something here... If the codebase is just
>> minimally data driven, transferring the book datas from one
>> database to another is truly trivial.

> Certainly.  But if you're talking about moving data between
> different game engines then the data will likely be meaningless,
> unless the import process involves some sort of translation
> procedure.  Say you import a longsword from a D&D rulesystem to
> one that uses weapon types as damage modifiers, and one which has
> no built-in longsword template.  The weapon might be plausibly
> effective in the fiction of the destination world, but making it
> work with the engine is another issue entirely.  I'm sure that a
> normalized data format could be agreed upon, but making it useful
> would still require a large amount of cooperation.

Of course, someone could always write a base protocol that describes
how data can be moved from one environment to another, and let each
developer create mappings based on the protocol, rather than having
to actually have any co-operation.

What springs to mind immediately from the networking world is
Shibboleth (http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/) and JANET-LIN.

The point of mentioning these is not *what* they are (which is
unrelated in reality), but more about the idea and concept behind
it: Shibboleth was created independantly, and the people who make
use of it map it to their own internal systems. It's a generic
protocol, implemented as needed.

So, someone who publishes the data may have a 'longsword', but when
it is described in the shared protocol while it may have a described
name or type listed as 'longsword', this can be mapped to whatever,
and the destination environment may not have a 'longsword' template
- and may not need one, as it can map the incoming protocol stream
to it's own internal systems.

Tom Gordon
CEO, AlienPants Ltd
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