[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[John Buehler]

Amanda Walker writes:

> On Feb 28, 2007, at 5:23 PM, John Buehler wrote:
> > To break out of this pattern, it's going to take things like
> > inexpensive
> > graphics engines that will let every Tom, Dick and Harry Developer
> > take a
> > shot at the graphical genre the same way that printf permitted the
> > parents
> > of those developers to take a shot at the textual genre.  That's
> > when the
> > zealots for depth will be able to step up to the plate and build
> > something
> > that will put World of Warcraft to shame.
>
> The graphics engines aren't the problem, I don't think   Torque has
> been out for years, for example, and even has a 3rd party "MMO Kit".
> Irrlicht and CrystalSpace are free, etc.

Thanks for the pointers.  I'm downloading as I type this  :)

> The problem I see for doing an indie MMO is infrastructure.  It takes
> a lot of bandwidth and computing power to support very many users,
> and current game engines are biased towards very centralized server
> implementations (which then biases the hardware investement towards
> "big iron" servers racked up in expensive data centers).
>
> This is not the only way to do it--the US Army, for example, does a
> lot of distributed simulation to support test & training: real time
> tactical simulation among hundreds or thousands of nodes with no
> central server at all.  Participants bring their own CPU power.
>
> The main barrier to doing this for a consumer game is the "untrusted
> client" problem.  Once there's a distributed MMO engine that is
> robust in the face of hacked clients, life could get very interesting
> very fast.

I wasn't thinking in terms of MMORPGs out of a garage, but the equivalent of
a text MUD in 3D.  Small numbers of players (the Torque page mentions 60+ in
an instance) is certainly the sort of thing that can be used to show the
appeal of depth in multiplayer games.

As for the untrusted client problem, I always look to the infuriatingly
inadequate internet infrastructure that we have today.  Alliteration aside,
I'm astonished that we continue to operate without any possibility of having
an internet identity.  If I'm running a server and I insist on having some
way of effectively blocking malicious connections, I should be able to do
it.

But I need to stop there or I never will.  Grrrr.

JB