On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 2:48 AM, Miriam English
<mim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Wow! Thanks Kris.
I hadn't heard of this one. Croquet sounds very interesting. I didn't understand it all in my first quick read-through, but I'll look much more carefully at it after I've finished my story. I've built virtual worlds before and this seems like a great environment to work in. Fancy being able to edit source and have the modifications appear in realtime without stopping and reloading! Neat. Pity it's not python though. :)
Yes, I've had a look at Minecraft and was very impressed with its cuteness, even though it looks very basic. I had no idea it was intended to let servers to share data like that. That's nearly p2p right there. All it takes is for every client machine to also be a server. (Well, not quite, but almost...)
Cheers,
- Miriam
Kris Schnee wrote:
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?