[MUD-Dev] Distributed virtual worlds - effort and physics

[ceo]

Sean Kelly wrote:

> 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.

Are you sure it is theoretically possible or practically possible?
I've participated in several attempts to formalise things like this
and each one has soone spiralled into an apparently bottomless pit
of complexity. I've seen attempts based on the P&P systems for
transferance (main problem is that they tend to be GM heavy,
i.e. require the existence of a human in the transferance
algorithms), to attempts to do a "ground-up" physical-simulation
style (hypothesis: if you specify each game-world in terms of a
physics system, then it becomes possible to deterministically
(i.e. programmatically without human intervention) transfer
behaviour from world to world - with the proviso that you are not
constrained by every rule of physics, e.g. energy / matter /
momentum / etc equations - or else you insert invisible sources and
sinks to make them work).

I periodically check around the web to see if anyone's made a new
attempt that is doing well, but haven't found anything yet. With
current mainstream programming languages I think it's just too much
work (for the programmer). Obviously, from the fact that I keep
checking, I half expect to be proved wrong sooner or later ;).

Along those lines, seeing as this code would not be time-critical, I
did have plans to attempt he phsyics-based transferance again this
time using an inference engine, which I think would work extremely
well, but ... I was going to use a proprietary inference engine
based on our MMOG middleware, which got shelved in the end
(insufficient commercial interest combined with a potentially huge
dev cost to get it to production quality).

Adam M
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