[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] OnLive might make MMOs much easier

[Jeffrey Kesselman]

Back at TEN we had a little MMO written by the Delta Tao guys that
basically worked this way.  They sort of made it work.

In general it seems a dumb idea to me for anythign PC based.  You have
al lthis power that the PC brings and you basically waste it and
instead have to buy all that power in your machine room to compensate.
 This ups cost.  The future I think is going the OTHER way... figuring
out how to use more and more of the user's machine's power without
exposing security risk.  There's a  lot of interesting academic
research pursuing this subject right now.

This also requires REALLY fast and reliable networks because you give
up any hope of latency hiding on the player's end.

In the set-top box space, this idea makes a lot more sense. There, the
set top box is being provided by the same people whio provide the
network so they have control over that, and they want to ship as
crappy a set top box as possible because they ship so many that any
addl cost easts into their bottom line worse then the machien room
costs



On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Matt Cruikshank
<mattcruikshank at gmail.com> wrote:
> Have you all seen the news about OnLive?
>
> http://www.onlive.com/
>
> The rough story is that they have servers that they run the games on,
> and they just stream the video to you at home. ?It'll be interesting
> to see if they survive!
>
> Well, if they do - they bring "trusted computing" to the MMO client.
>
> As I understand MMO development, one of the real drags is that you
> can't trust anything the client sends to the MMO servers, because it
> might have been faked, spoofed, modified along the way. ?You even have
> to be careful about what you send to the client, because it could be
> snooped. ?In short - cheating is a major problem.
>
> Well, if the MMO client is running on a trusted computer, where it's
> impossible for the end-user to fake, spoof, modify, snoop, doesn't it
> make MMO development a *ton* easier? ?Users can't explore unchartered
> land in your MMO simply by opening Map4307.png.
>
> The MMO client can talk directly to your database, if it comes to it.
>
> I'm just wondering how much of the *cost* of MMO development is in
> semi-trusting the data from the client, and limiting the information
> sent to the client. ?It seems to me from the outside that it's a lot.
> If the client is a trusted friend, it seems like the communication
> between client and server can be much more honest, frank, open, pure,
> simpler, using the data objects you really want to use, doing the
> computation much more where it's most practical.
>
> The client can tell the server whether or not the character hit the
> orc. ?Hell, the client can keep track of the orc's hit points, and
> tell the server to give the character the appropriate experience
> points if he kills it... ?When a party goes on a raid, the client
> computers can be totally in charge of everything that happens. ?It's
> like a LAN party, where you know no one will cheat. ?Each computer is
> running not just the character, but a portion of the enemies - say for
> instance the ones he is in melee combat with. ?His computer informs
> the other client computers what those specific enemies are doing.
>
> What, in this situation, does the MMO server really do? ?Record the
> character's inventory changes and the experience points gained. ?What
> else? ?It's a database - it might not do hardly ANY game physics or
> simulation, any more... ?Wouldn't that dramatically decrease the cost
> of running an MMO?
>
> Or am I over-inflating the costs of security, and the benefits of more
> TRUSTED computing horsepower right at the game client?
>
> -Matt Cruikshank
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