[MUD-Dev2] [Design]Characters moving between worlds [was Personalvirtual worlds]

[Michael Sellers]

Mike Rozak wrote:
> My philosophy and approach doesn't allow characters to move between
> worlds.
> There are at least three levels of "easy to move around worlds" that I've
> identified:
> 
> 1) Players find it easy to move around worlds, but they have completely
> different characters in each world.
> 
> 2) Players transfer an identity and appearance between worlds, but
> character attributes and objects don't move.
> 
> 3) Characters transfer between worlds.
> 
> My general opinion about characters moving between wolds (3) is that you
> run
> into heaps of problems that ultimately require worlds to be "acredited",
> with so much cooperation between world authors that they might as well
> work
> on the same world through shared source code/data. The basic problems
> involve: balance of rewards, security of the character's data, consistency
> of the world's feel/design, and transferring non-standard items between
> worlds.

Yep, those are some of the most glaring issues, plus security of the world
data if the objects are able to interact with it at all.  Multiple groups
over the years have worked on this without useful resolution -- it remains a
very thorny problem.  The problem of letting in data/objects/characters
"from the wild" comes down to an issue very much like what countries face
with 'customs' only worse.  

Also, anyone considering this area should note that Trip Hawkins (EA, 3DO,
now Digital Chocolate) holds a pretty strong patent on the process of
transferring data between worlds such that it takes on different forms in
each world (e.g. your knight with a cool sword on a warhorse in a fantasy
world becomes a pilot with a ray gun in a space ship in a SF world).  This
patent doesn't resolve the security issues, but it does remove a
'normalization' path for those who would munge incoming data to fit their
own world.  

Mike Sellers
Online Alchemy