Solipsis - a Decentralized Open-Source MMORPG

Anonymous Reader writes "Calling it an MMORPG is a bit of a misnomer because at this point there aren't any players, much less hit points, monsters, or flaming swords. Solipsis is an open-source project that aims to create a decentralized multi-user virtual world. It's still very much in its infancy, and as such the visuals are a bit lacking, but the aim is to create an endlessly scalable user-contributed world and it seems it's a nice platform to play with."

Comments

Croquet

[Elwood P Dowd]

Also vaguely interesting and along similar lines is Alan Kay's Croquet project.

It's not particularly mind blowing, but it has potential.

Cool... Let's see where this leads to.

[obi]

I'm quite interested in such a system. However, for a true decentralized system you need to put trust metrics at the core of the system, because cheating would just be too easy otherwise.

With a client/server model, you can just say: "everyone trusts what the server says, what the server says goes". With a P2P model you have no such easy way out.

Anyway, I'll be very closely watching this - the only distributed system that comes close is opencroquet, but that's not really suitale for a real-time environment.

While they might not necessarily succeed, it'll be very interesting to see their experience and conclusions once their prototypes start being used.

Re:Hacks

[Jahf]

For example: Have every client connect to the main server to track stats. If a stat gets modified faster than it could be changed in game, then an alarm goes off.


Under that assumption you have to at least allow 20 hours if not 24 hours of change. Sorry, but given the rate of casual players this would still screw them. You could still advance your character (characters with multiple computers or program instances) as if you were playing all day every day. Not nearly as fast as an insta-cheat, but still far more than a regular "real" player can keep up with.

There is almost no way that a true P2P game would be able to prevent hacking, even with a background checking server (which wouldn't be true P2P anyway). We've already seen a few cases of P2P hashes being hacked without changing their sums recently.

A police system is going to be far more effective than the alternative, but then you have to deal with the question of "10 people flagged this account as cheating but 20 people flagged him as being ok". Its less of an issue in a multiplayer game like Halo 2 (it isn't "massive" and you don't care nearly as much if player A is cheating because he only affects players B through Z, not players B through ZZZZZZ).

There is another plausible idea ... have the P2P network randomly change various binaries used in the game and force all clients to update to the new binaries to continue playing. The clients would have to download the binary -and- propogate it and each client would perform checks back to the server (perhaps even sharing it back to the server in random intervals) so that the server can confirm that not only is the hash the same, but the bits are not different. If the server finds altered binaries, it can force a traceback through the clients that that slice was shared from until it finds the "right" slice. The slice -after- that is the one causing the problems. Eventually the entire client would be refreshed and any impurities wiped out.

It wouldn't prevent cheating 100% of the time, but it would remove 100% of the cheats -over- time.

And if it gets used by a software company, consider this prior art.