My "Contingency Plan" design sketch

[belford]

I realize I'm flying in the face of opinion here. But some of the recent comments about how we shouldn't plan yet got up my nose. Normally I hate acting in anger (or even in mild irritation) -- but then I thought, well, what am I going to do about it? Write a 600-line design document?

Heck yes.

These are my ideas about how I'd put together a player-run Uru game. It is a hypothetical: *if* I were to create such a thing, how would I go about it? This is not a proposal to the Guild. It's *certainly* not a proposal to Cyan. Assembling ideas is not the same thing as making the decision to go through with them. I *can't* make the decision to go through with this; it would take a team of people with a lot of free time, and I'm just one person with very little free time.

Yes, I've seen Tweek's comment today saying

Now I spoke to Ryan last night who mention that they are waiting on some things. [...] For now I'd probably recommend letting Cyan have the time they need.

(I had about half of this written before I saw that comment, but that doesn't really matter.) That's fine. I don't intend to bother Cyan with this plan. (Although they're welcome to read it.) I am posting this to prove... a variety of points:

- A fan-run MMO game is a realistic possibility. We have the chops to design such a thing.
- It wouldn't have to use any of Cyan's code or intellectual property.
- Our ideas are not a threat to Cyan. (If this post frightens their lawyers, I'm sorry, they need new lawyers.)
- I am smart. :) More importantly, I am not afraid to throw a design out there, even though I have absolutely no reason to believe it will be used.
- He who hesitates, well, may not be lost but might have to play catch-up. (I certainly don't want this to be the *only* design plan the Guild sees, before or after April 10!)
- Faint heart never won fair lady.
- A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there. No, wait, that's Diana Wynne Jones.

Okay, enough self-justification. The rough draft of the plan is here:

http://eblong.com/zarf/uru/rj/essay-mmo-design.txt

I apologize for the plain-text formatting. I will eventually make a nice HTML version, but the document may grow some before it's finished, so it's raw for now.

EDIT-ADD: Since discussion has died down, I've posted a final version:

http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/03/desig ... adven.html

The changes are basically repeating the additional arguments I made here. If you didn't believe me, this probably won't help. :) I also altered the focus a little for a non-Uru audience. Basically just added a few lines of explanation of what "shards" and "instances" etc are.

[andylegate]

Obviously a deeply thought about subject, as even though it's a "sketch" you have obviously thought a lot about it. Here's some more to think about:

You're talking about creating an online community that basically has nothing to do with Uru, Myst and Cyan. This is to keep the legal problems at bay, and is understandable.
However, your back story does contain all those elements. Will there be a problem with that?

The fact that one "Links" to another Age could be considered IP with Cyan. I'm not 100% sure on that, but for the sake of argument, let us say that it does. If that is the case, then we need to find a completely different reason that a person is going from place to place and why, that has nothing whatsoever to do with Myst, D'ni, Uru, MOUL, or Cyan at all.

This can be very hard in the fact that your "Sketch" as you talk about how things might possibly work, you are using words that undoubtly help us know what you are talking about, but are very much Uru. Things like "KI images" and "KI chat"

Now, let us suppose for a moment that you (or others) succeed in finding something that, again, has absolutely NOTHING to do with Uru, MOUL, Myst or Cyan. Congradulations........now, what was the point?

What I'm saying is, more than 90% of the community has a very deep and driving desire to somehow make Uru or MOUL survive.
If they were looking for a 3d enviorment to chat, walk around, even suddenly be in strange a new places, and none of it has anything to do with Myst, Uru, MOUL or Cyan, there are already plenty of places like that online, both free and that you pay for. Genre's of all types. Dungeons and Dragon type RPG's, Sci-Fi type areas, even simply a alternate real life reality (2nd Life). You can be a pirate (we've lost one of our Maintainers to this already). Very soon, you can be jumping through a Gate Portal after dialing a Gate Address..........the list goes on and on.

So if you and others want to add to that, as you say, it will require a lot of work, and even more so to make it original (that has absolutely NOTHING to do with the D'ni, Uru, MOUL, Myst or Cyan, because I'm pretty sure even mentioning that you are making a Linking Book would violate Cyan's IP's) so that you attract people and have it work, with, as you say limited resources, money, people, and time.

However......as I just said......how does this attract all the devoted and hardcore Uru fans out there?

What you are suggesting, is not, I'm afraid, what they want. Without that community support from them, I don't think anything like you are suggesting will get off the ground very well. You'll hear the same thing over and over from them: "Yes, but it's not Uru. That's not what I want. If I wanted what you're talking about, I can go sign up over at There and be done with it."

Again, this is all assuming that there will be no way in the world that we can set anything up that has anything dealing with Uru or Cyan. That is a possibility, we just don't know at this point. Again, it all comes down to waiting and trying to find out what Cyan and GT's intentions are after the 10th of April. Until then everything is just pure speculation.

And that's fine if you like to do that. Thing is, what you are suggesting, and this is just my opinion, will fail from the start because, as you said, we'd have to make it have NOTHING to do with Cyan or the D'ni at all, and that is not what the majority of the community wants. For those that do want that, they've pretty much already left, or left a long time ago.

While I'm more than willing to make Ages for the off line version of Uru and have fun with that, if Cyan came along and said: "Sorry guys, but this is it, you get the Axe, anything dealing with Uru, MOUL or Myst is our or GT's IP and we can't let you do anything. It's been real, have a good life."
Then I believe that's it. It's over with.

Yes, there will and are those that would suggest that we plow ahead anyway and ignore any legal problems. A "Underground Uru" if you will, but I won't have any part of that I'm afraid.

Just my thoughts and opinions on what you wrote.

[Lontahv]

Ok, first of all. I really like your approach to it. It's just how I'd do it. Python, Python and more python, with a little zing from Ogre.

I would like:

1. Great physics.

2. Custom and pre-made avatar anims.

Apart from that it sounds good. I'm not sure how much of this you plan to do yourself or if you're just thinking ahead but... I'd love to talk about it with you a bit. If there is a D'Nay I want to work on it. I don't mean just toodle-around I want to be part of the main base programming.


Oh and a short question:

How are you planning to have the server-messages?

You can look here and see how cyan does it: http://wiki.cobbs.ca/index.php/Protocol_Specifications


I'm thinking of having a "Binary-Script-Flow" ie. you can define players when they link in.

So, instead of saying(this is not how it would be but I think you'll get the idea):

Lontahv:laugh
Lontahv:dance

you can say:

Lontahv = 02
02:laugh
02:dance


I'm not sure I like the idea of Jabber Chat. But it WOULD make our job easier(for chat).

The movement of the avvies MUST be handled be binary strings that are assembled in hex(an ascii letter is one byte ) If we make the server-messages right they can consist of only 1byte of meta-data per message. And if you add up ALL the letters that you'd use for meta-data alone with ascii... BYTES AND BYTES OF DATA . And... there are lots of different combinations you can have with a byte of data that ascii doesn't use(this is why when you open an exe in a text editor you get strange symbols and empty symbols) the whole world of byte-long commands in out there just waiting for us.


I'm also thinking about little things to close off strings so something like this,

0xbb(start of string)1a38b(something or other)0xcc(end of string)


Just pm me.

Oh and about back-story... we don't need any--we don't need to have many ages to link to. I'm thinking one planet and it only be Myst themed. Remember the last time uru fell though? People went to SecondLife(not myst themed at all), all you need is a place that's suitable and the fans do the rest. The heart of this game will be the FANS not the game.

~Lontahv

[Lontahv]

Oh and about jabber... the problem is that it contains too much meta-data.

I don't think it's smart like we could make our protocol. Think of how slim decimal-places make floats(floating-point-numbers).

Now imagine the number system without LAWS. If we have a pretty meaty client then the messages can be slimmer. It can count places and get values. Like this:

<playerID(6 places)><command(4 places)>

00001277a4

Rather than this:

Player:000012Command:77a4


IRC is even worse than #2 here--it has ASCII commands and meta-data.
Not sure about Jabber but... if it's meant for chat--it should stay that way.


~Lontahv

[Trylon]

Thanks forthinking along, belford.
I don't neccesarily agree with all your points, but you give some very interesting ideas.
Like having your "home" link a place of your own on earth.

I think we should assume that we can use linking with books. We shouldn't take the risk of alienating too much from the myst universe.
It may require obtaining a fan-fiction license from cyan (or something similar), but we should keep it D'ni-universe linked.

[greendragoon]

I agree, there is a certain amount of the current Uru that we must hang on to in order to make it worth while. If it pans out that Cyan does not have any plans to resurrect Uru in the near future, I wouldn't be surprised if you find that they're willing to let us have our on little corner or the D'niverse to play in. Just as long as it's possible that one day we could return to the Cavern. I do worry that having independent shards will fracture the community to much. At the same time, I do think it's too much to put everything on a single server. There has to be a way to fragment it but keep the illusion of connectedness.

Say for instance we have a single server devoted to being a sort of phone book of all the ages available. It could probably keep any other central data needed. When the client first connects, it grabs a copy of the age phone book. Now different ages are on different servers. If for instance your in Ahra Pahts, and you link to Zephyr Cove. Behind the scenes your client disconnects from the server that houses Ahra Pahts and connects to the server that handles Zephyr Cove. Oh but let's say Andy forgot to renew his hosting an the server is down. Well, the client is programmed for this eventuality and you link back to you home spot (i.e. your Relto Replacement.) Maybe we get we get fancy and have the phone book server run through and regularly check up on the servers. If a server is down, the corresponding linking panels go Riven or something. In this scenario, there would only be one copy of an age on one server, but for smaller less used ages you could put multiple ages on one server. Obviously heavily used ages would have to have their own nicer servers. If one server goes down, only it's ages become unavailable. The only exception is the global phone book server. If that goes down, there is no way to keep track of the other servers.

[Trylon]

At the same time, I do think it's too much to put everything on a single server. There has to be a way to fragment it but keep the illusion of connectedness.

I agree with that, and after diagonally reading the rest of your post, I think we are on the same page on that.

[greendragoon]

One other point I forgot to make. I think it is important that what ever system we come up with is more fast/scalable than Uru. To me, the point of such an endeavor would be to not only keep Uru alive, but eventually allow it to grow. Who knows one distant day, we may be able to hand it back to Cyan and say, "Look we've done all the work for you on making a new up-to-date engine." Wouldn't be great if the work we do hear lays the foundation for Cyan's return to Uru? At least that's how I see it.

I agree with that, and after diagonally reading the rest of your post, I think we are on the same page on that.

I think your monitor may be crooked.

[belford]

andylegate wrote:

Now, let us suppose for a moment that you (or others) succeed in finding something that, again, has absolutely NOTHING to do with Uru, MOUL, Myst or Cyan. Congradulations........now, what was the point?

It would have plenty to do with Myst and Uru. It would be the people from Uru, and the Guilds they formed, creating Ages in the memory and in the spirit of the D'ni people. How many times in the past month have you heard that the community is everything for this game? If the community is there, it will be Uru.

Of course, if no one shows up, then no one will show up. This is not a plan to undertake without plenty of buy-in from all sides.

I would certainly want to include some basic Uru elements: the layout of books, the linking sound, the Guild symbols. D'ni symbology. Clothing patterns that are popular among players. We'd need to ask Cyan for permission to use those -- and for their goodwill on the entire project.

When I say the project should avoid using Cyan's Age material, it's not because I want to duck under their radar. Rather, I want to maximize their chance of saying "yes".

[belford]

Lontahv wrote:

How are you planning to have the server-messages?

Well, this is the nice thing about Jabber. You don't have to worry about delimiters, Unicode characters, or stuff like that. You send a hierarchical data structure, and the jabber library wraps it up as legal XML.

A standard Jabber chat message looks like

<message to='ederfoo27@uru.net' from='ederfoo27@uru.net/belford' type='groupchat'>
<body>Greetings.</body>
</message>

So an emote might look like

<message to='ederfoo27@uru.net' from='ederfoo27@uru.net/belford' type='groupchat'>
<body>belford waves hello.</body>
<emote xmlns='urn:uru'>wave</emote>
</message>

Yes, it's a lot of overhead. But there's always *some* overhead. You linked to Cyan's protocol spec: that looks like a whole lot of overhead in a UDP packet, spent to make a reliable data stream. In other words, re-creating the TCP wheel. Wasted effort, it looks like.

I am willing to accept a fixed bloat factor in order to use a good, solid messaging service that somebody else built. :)

The movement of the avvies MUST be handled be binary strings that are assembled in hex

Nah. If I were implementing Counterstrike, I'd have to do that. I don't think an adventure game needs it. (Remember, as recently as Myst 4 we were clicking from room to room in discrete steps. Would the feel be so different if you saw other players doing that?) I'll just send movement packets one-tenth as often. Or one-twentieth if I have to.

greendragoon wrote:

There has to be a way to fragment it but keep the illusion of connectedness.

I understand the desire to do that. However, I wanted to keep my plan simple (in that dimension). I'm happy to see alternate ideas.

(The basic idea of jumping from server to server is simple. However, then you have to grapple with other server-synchronization problems: Identifying "the same player" between servers. Keeping your avatar clothing the same. Sending KI messages between servers. These are solvable problems; I just don't have a solution ready.)