From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263945AbTDYMt3 (ORCPT ); Fri, 25 Apr 2003 08:49:29 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263972AbTDYMt3 (ORCPT ); Fri, 25 Apr 2003 08:49:29 -0400 Received: from snoopy.pacific.net.au ([61.8.0.36]:5828 "EHLO snoopy.pacific.net.au") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263945AbTDYMt1 (ORCPT ); Fri, 25 Apr 2003 08:49:27 -0400 From: "David Luyer" To: "'Alan Cox'" , "'Daniel Phillips'" Cc: "'Jamie Lokier'" , "'Downing, Thomas'" , "'Linux Kernel Mailing List'" Subject: RE: Flame Linus to a crisp! Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2003 23:01:21 +1000 Message-ID: <089201c30b2a$c58c3ce0$46943ecb@pacific.net.au> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.4510 Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: <1051224351.4005.87.camel@dhcp22.swansea.linux.org.uk> X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org > On Iau, 2003-04-24 at 22:42, Daniel Phillips wrote: > > A more mundane goal would be to prevent the 3D driver from > > letting you see through polygons that are supposed to be > > opaque. > > In the MUD world we solved that by not telling anyone about > objects they can't see. The problem is not solved in the MUD world particularly well. Sure, you can not transmit the location of other players, but the client software (eg. zmud) can still give the client an advantage over the "innocent telnet using client", by doing things like keeping a map and tracking your current location (and even using point-and-click to go to any previously seen location). Discworld as an example had an area with left,right,back,forward directions which zmud was later enhanced to handle. So to make things a little harder they changed descriptions a little when "anomolies" appeared so automated "return to previous point" procedures would walk through the anomoly and get warped into a reality with hard to determine rules (directions left,right,forward,back, but if you go left four times you don't end up where you started). And there are other problems from the MUD world that have parallels in 3D online gaming... triggers, for example. Even colourization of MUD text by something like TF is equivalent to 3D drivers doing some kind of enhancement on distant objects (showing you the distant player movement that would otherwise be barely percievable). I'm not holding my breath for the first MUD to use DRM to ensure the end-user is directly connected to a keyboard with no triggers, mapping, colourization, etc in between though :-) Even if such a setup was possible, and say the keyboard was even a "signed device", you could still setup a mechanical device to override the keys for you and some OCR software on a second PC reading the screen's display and displaying the colourized version, processing triggers, generating maps, etc. There is sufficient technology available these days that DRM would be insufficient to even protect a MUD from the most basic forms of cheating. David.