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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."
*Waves cane*
We called them MUDs in our day! And people played with the concept of decentralizing them back then as well. Nothing ever came of it, AFAIK. As other posters have said, trust is a huge issue. There are other problems with latency, bandwidth, synchronization, etc.
When you do that client side stuff, you need to put checks on hackers. I won't get into much detail because maybe .01% of people who read this care, but you can pull off anti-hack tricks. Its important not to allow players to know the anti-hack tricks because they'd work around them. But if you make people pay for the game, and ban them, the overhead of loss will prevent most hackers.
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.
If you set up tons of trip wires like this, and institute a player based police system such as Halo 2 has, then you're set. If you don't protect a client side game against hacks, then if it gets popular, it will be hacked into the ground.
God spoke to me.
Here is an interesting article on cheating in MMORPGs.
http://www.arena.net/news/articles/mikearticle040Yeah, kind of reminds me of "The Palace" from back in the day....I was hoping for something a little more akin to current MMORPGs....perhaps 3d even?
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
I think the guy who said that it's basically a glorified decentralized chat system hit it right on the head. I read this and thought "Metaverse," and their webpage/wiki says as much. I don't think it's meant to be any sort of a coherent game, although doubtless someone will use it as such.
I think world boundaries and "streets" and other such metaphors for the physical world can be set up by using connection forwarding through other servers. For instance, if your Solipsis server is hosting a structure that's down the "street" from your buddy's server, then you would only accept incoming connections from your buddy's server. You would also block connection spoofing and maintain the illusion by checking back with his server to ask, "is XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX connected to you, and is it headed my way (trying to connect to me)?" Of course, lag issues would have to be worked out, but I certainly think it's something to work from.
I think goofy hacks will run wild, just like in Snow Crash, but server security can be set up to maintain a coherent world and keep out people you don't want around.
I had a look at this a week or so back, since there was a link to it on Terra Nova.
I really wasn't particularly impressed, to be honest, although I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and say that it is still very much early days as far as the project is concerned.
There would also be a couple of major obstacles to this in the real world, sadly.
a) With regards to content in particular, Sturgeon's Law would probably apply with a brutal vengeance.
b) With client-side character files and (worse yet) individual control of bandwidth from peers, you'd see 14 year old Neo wannabes swarming out of the woodwork everywhere, with things like the recent Blizzard speed hack, item duping, and so forth.
c) Although most people might, not everybody has broadband yet, sadly...and for this, everyone would need to. (I'm still on a 56k modem myself)
At least in terms of its level of progress, Croquet is far more interesting. I downloaded it and had a mess around with it...and although there are some issues which could be majorly improved, (texture size needs to be made uniform, for one thing) it's coming along well. It will be a while I think before a sufficient portion of the online population will have the processing capacity or bandwidth for a networked version of Croquet to be large-scale viable...but when we get to that point it could be very interesting. It essentially looks like an ancestor of the sort of completely 3D, networked virtual environment that Gibson and others wrote about.