bluemud

using and rewriting the codebase and extending the ideas developed at varium.com

[main] [history/milestones] [documentation] [research] [the tavern] [bluemudatlas] [project details]

history:

bluemud is a project to build a mud [?] server platform. We started this project in November of 2000 with several goals in mind:

multi-platform (Windows and Linux being the target audience)
efficient enough to work for small muds (100 rooms, 10 players) but scale to large muds (1000's of rooms, 100's of players)
extensible so that many different things can be build upon this base
use Python as the in-game language
provide a user-based and file-based security system so it's possible for no one to have access to things they shouldn't have access to

We first started out with the Varium mud server base and worked to extend it, test it with Python 2.0, and fix some of the issues it had. In January of 2001 we decided that we wanted to build this from scratch because of the security issue and we started thinking about a different architecture but continue with a pure Python implementation.

In April of 2001, we switched directions totally and rebuilt the driver in Java and the mudlib in Python using the Jython interpreter. This went on for some time until we we hit a series of issues:

Java lacks support for non-blocking I/O (until Java 1.4) and even then it's no match for a C select() or poll().
Sun's Linux JVM (this is true of 1.3) uses heavy-weight threads which (since we're spinning one off for every socket connection) isn't going to scale for us.
We're also not able to get the security working to the granular level we want it to work at due to some problems with the way Jython handles Python class loading.

In September of 2001, we started looking at a C/CPython architecture and analyzing a lot of the things we've learned over the last year and incorporating it into this latest design. We're still undecided about Java/Jython or C/CPython architectures. Regardless, version 1.0 will be a Java/Jython architecture.

milestones:

4/26/2001	We moved from a pure-Python architecture to using Java and Jython. We did this so that we can use Java's security to lock everything down to some degree.
6/12/2001	We now have races
7/20/2001	Restructuring of the whole project into a better directory structure.
7/26/2001	Implemented mud-time!
8/2/2001	Edited and updated an object in-game! Yay!
8/6/2001	Added user authentication and basic user security
10/24/2001	Investigating a prototype which is a re-write of the Java portions in C to make the mud faster, more efficient, and get rid of some of the obstacles that Java/Jython have created for us