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_projectThe 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?