Member Discussions

My colleague and I are designing and coding a MUD together, and somewhat of a disagreement arose as to the location we should be running our MUD. He wants the MUD to run on a server in our possession to eliminate the hosting fee. While I would like to have a company host it for us to have a more static address.

Then I had an idea that might work as a compromise. What if we had a stand alone connection manager, that would be hosted, to accept connections and route the traffic to our MUD. Since the manager would be very small in size and processing, we would only have to buy the most basic hosting package.

Players would be able to connect to the manager like any other MUD, and the MUD its self would connect to it also. It would then route all traffic to the MUD, and the manager could compress everything before sending it on. The MUD would then reside on our server where it could grow as big as we want it.

I haven't thought to deeply about it and just wanted to see if anybody sees any problems with this kind of design.

-Maxxus

This only applies if you have a dynamic IP. If you have a static IP I suggest you draw yourself a diagram of what you're proposing and a direct model and ponder if there's any unnecessary parts in yours.

Methods for dynamic IPs:

1. Don't reboot the server.


2. Register a dyndns (or similar domain) and get a DNS updater. If you don't like the 'toy' domain name, just register a real one with dyndns directly (a fee applies) or then register one elsewhere and have the DNS records of the real domain point to a dyndns domain.


3. Get a hub and a second computer. When you need to reboot the server, have the second computer connected to the Net. This way your router's IP will survive the reboot.

Questions about the connection manager on this board, about the layout on Admin's.

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If your ISP allows it, try to get a static IP. It may be cheaper than a basic MUD account.

There is one major advantage to using a routing server to connect to the main game that I have been considering myself: It would be possible to run several different versions of the game on different servers to handle larger amounts of traffic. Granted, there are few text-based ORPG's out there that would require such extra expenses, but if your developers all have their own seperate machines then the games could be hosted there and one address could be used by the players like so:

Connected to thiscoolmud.com...

Please choose a server:
1) Boston, Mas. U.S.A. (19 players connected).
2) London, Eng. U.K. (23 players connected).
3) L.A. Cal. U.S.A. (45 players connected).
>

Well, at least it looks cool ;-)

Heh, you'd first have to work out synchronization issues between the separate copies, otherwise the players wouldn't be able to interact with each other. Might as well just upgrade the main server.

This is exactly what MUME did a decade ago. They had multiple 'login servers' which communicated with a main server via compressed UDP packets (the transatlantic link not being very good at that point).

If you google for 'mume udp server' you can find some more articles about it, random bits of information that have been disclosed in the past. E.g. this one which describes the general principle of such a set up:
http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/2000Q2/msg00075.php

Note however that MUME's requirements were quite different from the original poster's: it was to reduce the bandwidth load on the target server, apparently due to the complaints of the school administration.

These days, such a complaint is best handled by requiring the users to use MCCP which will not only cut your bandwidth usage to a third but decrease the players' latency.

I thought of another benefit in that, if the server happens to crash, ours not the host, then it would be easy just to load up a copy of the MUD on a different machine while the server was being repaired. Definitely a good thing if server is going to take more than a day to repair.

-Maxxus

Or maybe you should just do what I said and buy two computers :)

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