[vworld-tech] Ultimate MMO Platform (was OT:Dead?)

[Jim Purbrick]

> A system that allows the addition of 
> future behavior
> and interactions between entity or component types without 
> touching the base
> interface - that everything is made up of components, and 
> entities know how
> to respond to certain entity types or components, with entity 
> type often
> being defined by the components attached.

This is part of what I had in mind, the architecture of the logical
representation of the world. How are things like trees and buses and bus
drivers modelled? How do they interact? Are objects mainly lists of
properties in a prototype system which are used by game systems (physics
uses mass and volume properties, combat uses hitpoints and strength
properties) or do objects have behaviours triggered by events poked at them
by the platform (a mine and a ship collide, both are told about the
collision event they have taken part in, the ship delegates the outcome to a
standard behaviour, the mine overrides this behaviour and goes boom). Maybe
you have both? These are the things that the replicated objects I was
talking about before do. These logical behaviours just get on an do their
thing, not worrying about the synchronisation happening at a lower level.
What I vaguely have in mind is some kind of MUD like object model like
LlambdaMOO at this level, with the network VR synchronisation stuff
happening underneath.
 
> Or were you looking for something more grounded in what 
> current tech is
> likely to handle?  The above system can be simplified and 
> added to over the
> course of time, but the examples given were high-end.

I don't think the right approach is to just try to model a world at the most
detailed level possible, but to model the world in enough detail for the
game it supports. There would be little use in modelling trees in the
painful detail you describe if the game was a vietnam combat game where all
that happened was the trees got flown over at high speed and then napalmed.