[MUD-Dev2] [TECH DESIGN] Next Generation Infrastructure

[Lachek Butalek]

On 3/2/07, Phillip Lenhardt <philen at monkey.org> wrote:
> I dream of the days of a distributed engine, too.  Unfortunately,
> hardly anyone (anyone at all?) is working on it.  The only one I
> can remember from the old MUD-Dev days is the one Crosbie Fitch
> proposed and championed, and that seems pretty dead in the water.
> The only live project that I know of is http://opencroquet.org,
> which shows a lot of promise.  Of course, it is built on top of
> a non-standard platform (Squeak) and it comes from academia; which,
> historically, means that it will never gain enough traction to be
> viable.

WorldForge's Cyphesis server is designed as an NPC server - its
intention is to process instructions for entities in the world, such
as AI scripts. The main server component, Indri, has been planned for
but has not reached release-grade code yet, so Cyphesis currently acts
as the main server component for their test game, Mason.

The idea is that multiple Cyphesis server instances could be running
on multiple machines - even client computers, depending on trust (not
sure if "trust" has been considered yet) - and would handle the
low-latency, high-demand processing, while the
single-instance-per-world Indri server would handle the "world"
aspects, perhaps even asynchronously, by communicating with individual
Cyphesis servers. This way, one should be able to maintain a large
world without sharding on moderately sized hardware - a little bit
like Eve handles things, with single server instances handling a
single area but the world being a cohesive whole.

I should add that this was the plan as of a few years ago when I
looked at it closely, things may have changed since then. Find out
more at http://worldforge.org/dev/eng/servers.

Good idea, not sure how it would work in practice. :)

Lachek