On 2010.11.5 8:09 PM, Miriam English wrote:
Okay, I've found some stuff that I hadn't heard of before that some of
you folks might be interested in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project
The Croquet Project seems to be similar to that. The indie game
Minecraft is apparently going to have servers linked so that a character
can walk from one server's world to another.
A question that Croquet brings up is how to spread out the computation
between computers. There's a project called OpenSimulator that sets up
independent servers for the game Second Life, but I believe that works
on a more standard client/server arrangement. Croquet is set up so that
the calculation is done on every machine, which is inefficient but
ensures every machine does the same thing... at the cost of the system
being as slow as the slowest PC, if I understand right. At the other end
of the scale, with Minecraft it'd probably be possible for one server to
let players easily get hoards of valuable items, then try to walk onto a
higher-difficulty server with items intact. So for a game you'd have to
think about which machine enforces the rules against cheaters, and the
more centralized it is, the more it's like the client/server setup.
If someone wants to test out building a Python P2P gaming system, don't
assume it has to be for real-time 3D games! Why not try making a P2P
text MU?