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

[Jeffrey Kesselman]

OnLive is absolutely the wrong technolgoy for this.

Im sorry, it just is.

It makes NO accommodation for latency which is your number one design
issue in MMOs today.

Furthernore, with increasing demands  on the game world for things
like physics modeling and

Today, what you do is design a server that holds state and does enough
sanity checking to ensure against
hacking/cheating, but you push as much visual calculation as possible
to the client where you have the full rich
and more importantly *local* computing environment that your plyer
brings with him or her and you get for
free.

Most  importantly that client does latency hiding of various forms.
(Predict and correct movement models, hiding latencies in aniamtion
times and so on.)  This is all to preserve the critical illusion of
immediacy for the user.

So your instinct that you need server side logic to prevent cheating
is a good one, but this is a silly technology
(if it is a technology, and i have my doubts) to apply to this. It
buys you nothing and costs you much processing power, plus it makes
latency hiding impossible.

<plug mode on>
If you want to see a real technology designed to actually address the
real issues of MMO server development, look at project darkstar.
www.projectdarkstar.com
</plug mode off>

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 8:06 AM, Richard Boehme <rboehme at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 2:34 PM, Matt Cruikshank
> <mattcruikshank at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> So, what I'm saying is that if the MMO Client - the game data, the
>> game logic - can be installed on the OnLive Server, then it becomes
>> trusted.
>
> It could probably be trusted, but if you trust the client, you would
> only be able to run on OnLive - your MMO would be dependent on them,
> because it would be dependent on client trust. If you stick to the
> model where the client isn't trusted, you could deploy to OnLive as
> well as whatever other platform you want. It's a matter of
> artificially limiting yourself to one platform simply in order to save
> effort in coding the server.
>
>
> --
> Thank you.
>
> Richard Boehme
>
> Email: rboehme at gmail.com
> Phone: 443-739-8502
> Blog: http://www.cookingxp.com/
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