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Started by tda... Paul Robinson
Sun, 15 Jan 1995 21:28
RFD: Proposal for networked games and how they run
Author: tda... Paul Robinson
Date: Sun, 15 Jan 1995 21:28
Date: Sun, 15 Jan 1995 21:28
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The following document gives some explanation over the issue of games
which are in use now and the increased use of networking in those games,
and proposes creating a standard for that activity. Please cross-post
this message to any groups that may be interested in such things, so that
comments on the subject may be raised.
This document has been submitted for publication as an Internet Draft.
Thank you for your consideration,
Paul Robinson <pa...@tdr.com>
Network Working Group P. Robinson
Internet Draft Tansin A. Darcos & Co.
Expires: July 15, 1995 January 16, 1995
Overview of Game technology
<draft-robinson-games-overview-00.txt>
Status of this Memo
This document is an Internet Draft. Internet Drafts are working
documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its
Areas, and its Working Groups. Note that other groups may also
distribute working documents as Internet Drafts.
Internet Drafts are valid for a maximum of six months and may be
updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time.
It is inappropriate to use Internet Drafts as reference material
or to cite them other than as a "work in progress".
Please check the I-D abstract listing contained in each Internet
Draft directory to learn the current status of this or any other
Internet Draft.
Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Abstract
This document looks at games and their use on computers, where
they have been and where they are going, their relationship to the
Internet and its eventual to communicate for multi-player
capability. The document solicits input on, and proposes creating,
a generic standard for game protocols and other systems that
generate real-time and transaction-based traffic.
Robinson [Page 1]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
Table of Contents
Status of this Memo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Table of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
"In the beginning..." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
"Shut it down. Shut it down, NOW." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
"I don't mind you coming here, and wasting all my time..." . . . . 3
"You are in a maze of twisty litle passages, all alike." . . . . . 3
"'Is this real or is this a game?' 'What's the difference?'" . . 4
"...not playing for 3-In-1 Oil here, we're playing for money..." . 4
"Shall We Play a Game?" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
"Show me your papers..." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
"Keep on..Pushin'..." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
"..The map only tells what *could* be done..." . . . . . . . . . . 6
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are in hell." . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
"Because you're pushin' too hard, you're pushin' too hard..." . . 7
"I feel the need... I feel the need for... speed..." . . . . . . . 8
"Prepare for Descent..." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
"...Grab what you can get..." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
"Going Out For Business" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
"I'd tell you everything, if you'd pick up the telephone..." . . . 9
"That doesn't count..." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
"In the forseeable future...traffic will not get any better..." . 10
"Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night..." . . . . . . . . . 10
"Advantage..." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
"Can I offer you a proposition?" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Quotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Correspondence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Robinson [Page 2]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
"In the beginning..." (a)
In the past, people used large mini or mainframe computers located
at their school (or work), and either wrote games for those
systems, or loaded games onto them that they had gotten from other
sources. However, this often contradicted the stated policy of
usage of such machines for official educational purposes. [1]
"Shut it down. Shut it down, NOW." (b)
Typically, the administrators of most sites opposed the use of
their sites for playing games and typically frowned upon or
proscribed their usage, usually doing one of the following:
- looked the other way, e.g. there was an "official" policy not
to allow them, but as long as they don't impact the regular
work, they would be ignored;
- not permitted and stamped out if someone complained;
- not permitted at all and systematically removed when found
even if no complaints about the games were made.
"I don't mind you coming here, and wasting all my time..." (c)
It may have been the sharing of this type of material from site to
site that was one of the impetuses to the creation of the
Internet, since with direct connections, you can download files
directly instead of having to ask an operator to mount a tape.
When the operators don't know about it, there is more likelihood
that admin doesn't either. [2]
"You are in a maze of twisty litle passages, all alike." (d)
A few sites discovered that if games were openly permitted,
usually with a restriction, e.g. no game playing during heavy
usage times or when terminals were in short supply, etc., they
found that in most cases the problems they were having tended to
be reduced, because people weren't loading up their systems with
multiple copies of the applications, all alike and wasting disk
space, or hidden in specialized ways, in order to hide them from
zealous administrators. [3]
I admit that games can cause significant resource usage on a
system. But unless computer time was so scarce that the system
was chronically slow and underpowered even for regular use, this
should not be all that significant an issue.
Robinson [Page 3]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
"'Is this real or is this a game?' 'What's the difference?'" (e)
A game can represent similar programming challenges equivalent to
work done in the "real world" including
- database management (the program has to access a file);
- multiuser operation and file and record locking (if you
keep records on people such as trading, kills and user
status, and their interactions change those records in
real time while the game is running, then it is
necessary to correlate updates to those records while
multiple users are accessing them; that means that
record and file locking schemes have to be developed);
- encryption (if the datafile is publicly accessible, if
someone can guess how the file is formatted, they could
change their own record to improve their characteristics
or reduce someone else's to their detriment.)
It was reported that when Data General was developing the Eclipse,
a competitor to Digital Equipment's VAX series of computers, one
of the ways the engineers tested the machine to see if it would
work for typical customer applications was to play Collosal Caves
Adventure on it, typically for several hours at a time. [4]
"...not playing for 3-In-1 Oil here, we're playing for money..." (f)
But games, despite being painted as trivial by administrators of
large sites (typically because the overhead of same slowed down
some of the processing of other jobs), are serious business.
- As far back as the late 1970s and into the 1980s, coin-
operated video games in arcades were making more than
$7,000,000,000 worth of business a year, one quarter at a
time. [5]
- It was Nintendo that brought the virtually dead game
cartridge business back from oblivion with its consoles for
games to be played on TV sets.
- Nintendo's success in this market encouraged Sega and others
who had been in the coin op field to come over to home games.
- Stores that rent video tapes of movies now routinely rent
cartridges of video games as well, for a nominal fee,
typically $1 to $3 for as long as three days. The number of
stores that are doing this now is a prime indication that
they are making money at it.
Robinson [Page 4]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
"Shall We Play a Game?" (g)
With the availability of personal computers owned by individuals,
the status of games being on them changes. The administrator of
the "site" the game is on is the one playing the game, and in fact
wants the game on his system.
Now, this was fine because most of the games coming out were
designed for use on single player machines and were designed to be
run on a dedicated machine. With more people playing games on
PCs, and the increase in hardware capability, meant that the
capability of games was increased, raising the ante of what was
required to run them.
"Show me your papers..." (h)
The game "Wolfenstein 3d" which was created by ID Software,
required an 80286 processor and a VGA monitor, a considerable
departure from games in the past that would run on an 8086 with
CGA or sometimes EGA monitors. [6] A similar version of the game
was released for sale in computer stores under the name "Spear of
Destiny".
The idea behind the game was you had been captured in Nazi Germany
during World War II and had to escape from Castle Wolfenstein
before the Germans executed you as an American spy. The game,
because of use of the generic Nazi symbol of a Swastika, was
placed on the Banned List in Germany.
"Keep on..Pushin'..." (i)
The Wolf-3d series of games pushed the state of the art with
- high quality graphical image of the area the user is
playing in;
- multimedia support for sound on a PC speaker, or using
add-in cards such as the Gravis Ultrasound and Sound
Blaster;
- doors that open, including doors requiring keys;
- pushable walls providing secret rooms and passages;
- 360 degree pan capability, allowing the user to turn
around and look;
- enemies with all six sides, meaning an enemy can be
facing you, facing away from you, or be facing to the
left or right; [7]
- enemies that don't attack until they see you or hear you
Robinson [Page 5]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
do something.
The game created an area in which the user could walk around,
fighting and shooting his way through the enemies coming after
him, gathering artifacts either needed to allow him to boost his
health level continue in the game, or to allow him to solve a
puzzle.
A game of this type has to run locally; these and other games
which are coming out are very resource intensive in comparison to
the stuff administrators were throwing off their sites years
ago. [8]
"..The map only tells what *could* be done..." (j)
Something else also happened: these games were written as generic
engines that drive the capabilities of the game, and use map files
that described the game in a specific way, without the engine
caring about the details of the game's playing field, as opposed
to having an "intimate relationship" between the game and the data
file. [9]
This meant that if the map format could be figured out, new games
using those maps could be created. And they did: a number of
people created add-on maps to Wolf-3d that provided such features
as
- new mazes and specialized puzzles;
- a new scenario where you fight off ninjas and sumo
wrestlers;
- a new scenario where you rescue Christmas Presents
captured by a false santa and his evil pseudo-elves.
This wasn't expected by the developers of the game, but rather
than fight the users, they took advantage of the interest in this
capability when their next game, DOOM, [10] came out, as is
explained below.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are in hell." (k)
About a year after Wolfenstein 3d was out, [11] ID Software stuns
everyone in the community by raising the state of the art in
computer games by creating the game "DOOM". [12]
In this game you are attacking an outpost of aliens that has
teleported one of the moons of Mars into hell. You have to fight
your way through the aliens and mazes in the maps, and escape back
Robinson [Page 6]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
to earth, or die trying.
"Because you're pushin' too hard, you're pushin' too hard..." (l)
In including 360 degree pan visual effects started in Wolf-3d,
DOOM again pushed the state of the art, with:
- texture mapped graphics;
- different light levels including rooms with pulsating
and flashing light;
- use of sound to indicate occurrence of events;
- event triggering by walking through an area; no longer
does something happen by picking up or touching
something, now, just walking into a room can cause all
sorts of problems;
- objects that in and of themselves are dangerous: a
rocket launcher that causes damage to the person using
it if he's too close to the target, and barrels of
radioactive liquid that explode if struck by a
projectile, and cause damage to anything nearby;
- doors that open by moving up to the ceiling or down to
the floor;
- "one way" doors that can be opened on one side, but not
on the other;
- rooms of odd shapes and non-square wall crossings;
rooms can be semicircular, triangular or other shapes
than plain rectangles;
- special effects such as floors that are radioactive,
causing injury to the player simply by standing there;
- multiple kinds of enemies that do different levels of
damage;
- enemy and player sprites taken from actual models to
present realistic looking movement (the knees bend, the
body moves up and down, etc);
- ceilings that could come down and crush the player;
- collapsing floors;
- single areas which are not the same height, implying the
need for elevators, stairs and other devices to move up
and down;
- teleporters that move the user from one part of the map
across to another part of the map without going through
the intervening areas;
- a most critical capability: a "hot patch" capacity
allowing a game map to have parts of it replaced,
including changing the textures of walls, floors, the
appearance of enemies, and even redrawing the maps to
change what the game does. This means third-parties can
design new maps for the game. [13]
Robinson [Page 7]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
It also required an 80386 processor as the minimum platform it
would operate upon. [14]
It also added a new feature not seen before in computer games
running on personal computers: you could play against other users
over an IPX network, or via modem or serial connection. [15]
"I feel the need... I feel the need for... speed..." (m)
With the level of processor on the individual's desktop
progressively rising, the technology of games is climbing to use
all that otherwise underused technology. In fact, the game needs
the latest technology to run at acceptable speeds. I think it's
too fast, but many people playing the game "DOOM" complain that
anything less than an 80486 processor is too slow. [16]
Now we are seeing the next development in games: a game that runs
on a user's own machine in standalone mode, but can use a network
or a modem to send packet information to other people playing that
application on their machines, in order that those people can
interact with each other and play the game either cooperatively or
competitively. [17]
"Prepare for Descent..." (n)
The envelope just got pushed even further. Starting with the
technology of high-quality graphics first started in DOOM, and the
technology of flight simulators, another company, Parallax
Software, created a new game called Descent, that also provided
- different light levels;
- odd shaped rooms including rooms with sloping floors and
ceilings;
- "glass" displays that generate shatter effects if struck
by projectiles;
- high quality texture mapped graphics;
- full six-degrees of freedom of movement: not only can
one turn and move in a 360 degree circle, one can also
move up and down 360 degrees as well;
- rooms which are not only side-by-side but above and
below one another, allowing multiple levels;
- a flight-simulator type of environment, including
missiles that "lock onto" the target, either the enemy
or you, meaning even if you run or evade, the missile
continues to track and follow you;
- continues the ability to play the game standalone or in
Robinson [Page 8]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
network mode.
Descent and DOOM are so similar in the graphic capability -
although entirely different game styles - that many of the
newsgroups and mailing lists dealing with DOOM are getting traffic
dealing with the game Descent even though the products are from
two different companies.
"...Grab what you can get..." (o)
Descent will play on a '386, but even I concede it's probably too
slow for a serious game player, and most people who play it will
probably want a '486 or higher to play the game if they can get
it.
"Going Out For Business" (p)
With the recent moving of the Internet from a purely research
network with an acceptable use policy limiting the content of
traffic, to a fully commercial network allowing any traffic which
could be run over a private network, the development of new
features and new capabilities otherwise unavailable before is now
possible.
"I'd tell you everything, if you'd pick up the telephone..." (q)
Let's assume for a moment I connect via a telephone line to a
commercial Internet provider in Maryland, and say I have a program
to generate traffic on a SLIP connection to a commercial Internet
provider in Los Angeles or New York or Texas, and a customer of
that site has a SLIP connection to accept that traffic and respond
to it, if all our traffic follows commercial networks, there is no
restriction on what we send over that pipe, whether it be e-mail,
commercial EDI transactions, telephone calls translated to digital
data, or the packets necessary to run a game between the two of
us.
This means that with games such as DOOM, Heretic, Descent, and the
new games that will be created in the future, network traffic
using these games will increase. Use of the Internet for
transporting game-related packet traffic will increase, as with
all traffic that is being sent via the Internet.
Robinson [Page 9]
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"That doesn't count..." (r)
This does not even count the games that are already running such
as Multi-User Dungeons and other facilities. [18] Those require
nothing beyond a telnet connection at the caller's computer, and
use no significant resources on his end; all the work is done at
the destination site.
"In the forseeable future...traffic will not get any better..." (s)
This issue needs to be examined further. As more games are
developed that can use networks, this will increase the amount of
network traffic that occurs. Also, without standards many games
will tend to use a lot more bandwidth and generate more network
traffic than is necessary. Also, the programmers for each game
will typically each design their own protocol for the type of data
to be sent and received. Some people have reported that even on
networks of 1Mbps, four players running DOOM can consume a large
part of the bandwidth.
"Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night..." (t)
E-Mail became popular on the Internet with the standardization of
RFC 821 for the format of messages, and SMTP for their delivery.
Newsgroups became popular and easy to implement when the format of
news messages submitted and NNTP delivery method was also
standardized.
Games are doing networking in an ad-hoc method using whatever they
think is the best way to go about handling the traffic they need
to generate. This also makes it difficult to support other
methods of handling networking. For example, DOOM supports up to
four players. Many people play in two-by-two format because they
use a modem. If the packet generation method were standardized,
it would have been possible to have a server site on the Internet
where people could connect and it would pass traffic around
directly allowing four players to connect via modem. As such,
that is not possible without some significant effort due to the
lack of standards for passing packets involving game information.
What is needed is a standardized packet format method which can be
used in a generic format to allow simplified transmission of
transactional data, and even to allow servers to handle
transporting that data on multi-player sites.
Robinson [Page 10]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
"Advantage..." (u)
The advantages of developing a system of this kind are many:
- Games using the standardized method can have most of the work
done on the user's site or even on his local computer;
- The game program need not constantly send out repeated text
information which can be done locally;
- The amount of traffic needing to be sent can be reduced; the
only thing that has to cross the network are the
informational packets, and not the messages explaining the
data;
- A multi-user game can be distributed as an application to run
on the user's own computer, and all the host computer has to
do is handle the bookkeeping of the various users;
- If you know how the game works, and there is no local command
processor for that game, you can implement one for your
machine; as long as you accept the correct packets and send
the correct responses, the host need only handle bookkeeping
of users of the transaction system;
- If a standard exists, features which might not be included in
an ad-hoc private specification such as authentication and
forgery protection can be included and made part of the
standard;
- A benchmark source code can be created to handle the
requirements of the standard, such as exists with code for
many applications on the Internet, including Sendmail, INN
News, and TCP/IP transmission; this can reduce the chance of
errors;
- A system of this type is usable for more than just games:
anything using repetitive transaction processing is suitable
for the type of capability supplied by the specifications;
- Improvement in the means to do game transactions in a
standard method would allow for other forms of transaction
processing to be possible, something that is not currently
possible under the Internet now, but will be necessary in the
future if commercial transactions are to occur other than
using proprietary and expensive interfaces.
"Can I offer you a proposition?" (v)
I therefore propose to declare and design an specification for an
optional generic standard for transmission of transaction-based
data for use in games and other real-time and on-line transaction
systems.
The purpose of the standard will be to provide a base level which
is rich enough in features to handle the needs of most games being
created in the forseeable future, as well as handle other needs
Robinson [Page 11]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
which may be developed, and even to allow the extension to other
features as new ideas are proposed.
I will be interested in accepting input from people interested in
proposing requirments and standards for this specification.
Issues to be raised include:
- What types of data to be passed;
- Packet and transaction sizes;
- Authentication and verification, assuring the validity of the
transaction and its accuracy;
- Defeating replay and playback, as well as spurious
transmissions;
- Providing for compression of data transferred and reduction
of traffic generated;
- Providing for the type of connection, either continuous
during the life of the game, similar to Telnet, or
reestablished each time, similar to Gopher;
- Other issues as needed to be raised related to this and other
issues which are part of the whole scope of the problem.
In the event this generates a significant amount of traffic,
either a newsgroup and/or mailing list will be created for the
purpose of handling discussions related to this issue.
Robinson [Page 12]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
Acknowledgements
Some names used in this document are private marks of various
companies. It is not an attempt on the part of this author to
make a determination as to what is or isn't a trademark or
servicemark of some company, and capitalization of a word or
phrase, and / or failure to do so of a word or phrase claimed by
someone as a trademark is not intended to have any effect upon
their claims.
Quotes
Items named in double quotes "like this" are from movies. Items in
single quotes 'like this' are from songs.
[a] The first three words of the King James Bible.
[b] Supervisor giving order to a technician, "Die Hard".
[c] The Cars, 'Just what I needed'.
[d] Oft-quoted line from Collossal Caves Adventure computer program,
circa 1978.
[e] Matthew Broderick and the WOPR computer, "Wargames"
[f] Bruce Dern, "Silent Running"
[g] The WOPR Computer, "Wargames".
[h] Typical dialog from many movies dealing with Nazi Germany.
[i] 'Keep on pushin'.
[j] Arthur Hill, "Andromeda Strain".
[k] William Windom, tv program "Twilight Zone: Five Characters in
Search of an Exit."
[l] 'You're pushin' too hard'.
[m] Tom Cruise, "Top Gun".
[n] From the description of each mission in the game Descent from
Paralax Software.
[o] Kris Kristofferson, "Rollover".
[p] Sign commonly used at places that want people to think they are
closing, to indicate they want to do more business.
[q] Electric Light Orchestra, 'Telephone Line'.
[r] Complaint by a pool player that the shaking of the earth should
not affect his turn in the movie, "Earthquake".
[s] Burt Lancaster, "Airport".
[t] Beginning of the motto of carriers of the U.S. Mail.
[u] Comment indicating a tennis player is ten points ahead of the
opponent.
[v] Robert Redford, "Indecent Proposal".
Robinson [Page 13]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
Notes
[1]. What is noted is that there is a lot of complaining over use of
college computers for playing games, yet nobody seems to object to
college libraries buying fiction which is not used in any course,
simply for the reading pleasure of the students. And beyond which
- especially during hours when computers are lightly loaded -
computer time is a wasting asset. Computer time that isn't used
can't be saved up for later.
[2]. Some people might wonder about the tone of the message I am
putting forth here. In too many places I've seen, the
administrators put rules into place that had no real value to
learning and in many cases made learning difficult. Manuals
locked away or requiring permission to use them, restrictions on
amounts of cpu time someone could use (when the machine was owned
by the school and thus cpu time didn't cost anything) even when
the machine was lightly loaded.
Setting limits such as not having multiple copies of an
application, not using it when there are a lot of people on the
system or during the finals weeks when students have final
computer programs to make and need the machine time, are more
reasonable than outright bans, and typically such rules are
complied with.
It would have been one thing if outright bans were instituted
because of chronic game playing to the detriment of "real work"
was occurring on a site; then such a measure makes sense in such
circumstances. I suspect that such occurrances were extremely
rare, much less common than administrators would have admitted.
Most of these restrictions served no useful purpose except
political aggrandizement of the administration, similar to the way
the 55 MPH speed limit is used in the U.S. not to protect people
from dangerous conditions, but to intentionally underset the safe
speed for a particular road so that more people can be sited for
speeding and fined, thus using the rules as a way to raise money.
[3]. Typically, one way to be sure a game was around on a system was
that if the people running it were playing it - especially if the
game allowed users to fight each other - it was a good sign that
it was allowed to be there!
[4]. Tracy Kidder's book "The Soul of a New Machine."
[5]. Later video games that were more complicated and more expensive
raised the price to 50c per game to start, and 25c each additional
"life".
Robinson [Page 14]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
[6]. My primary use of a PC was to do some programming, word
processing, call bulletin boards and Internet connection services.
As a result of which I stayed with a 4MHZ 8086 machine for more
than five years. I damaged my computer requiring me to move up,
so I bought a used 10 MHZ 8086 which was more than enough for my
needs until Wolf-3d came out. Since it required a 286, I had to
have one to play it, so I bought a 286.
[7]. Wolfenstein 3d allows the user can actually do a 360 degree turn
and look around both in front, to the sides, and behind. In fact,
playing the game depends on making turns to look for enemies.
[8]. A locally written version of a Star Trek game in Basic that ran on
our school's PDP-11/03 was less than 2K of disk space for the
program; it did not use any data files. It did a fair enough job
considering that it had to run in 3K of memory. (We ran 4
terminals at 2400 baud on a machine with 56K of memory.)
A version of Star Trek, written in Fortran for the Univac 90/60
mainframe took up some 150K of disk space plus another 10K for the
data files, and could be used by multiple users, so only one copy
of the program or data file had to be present on the system. (If
anyone knows if the sources to that file are still around, please
let me know; I would be interested in obtaining a copy.)
A multi-user space fighting game privately developed on a local
mainframe system I used, which supported full interactive
operation by multiple users, record locking to support updating of
transactions of people buying, selling and killing each other,
took about 50 routines, ran less than 130 printed pages of
Fortran, and probably used less than 200K of disk space in total,
on a mainframe computer servicing over 100 terminals.
Wolf-3d runs about 95,000 bytes for the game engine, plus another
50K for the database. DOOM is 500,000 bytes for the application,
plus 4 megabytes of space for the data file in the shareware
version, eleven meg in the registered version. Heretic is 750,000
bytes for the application and 4 1/2 meg for the shareware version.
Descent is 1,024,000 bytes for the application alone; the data
files take up another 6 meg. Demo files for Descent can be a
megabyte or larger.
Robinson [Page 15]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
[9]. An example of this is in the original and often ported Collossal
Caves Adventure which runs on virtually any computer which
supports a Fortran Compiler, some that don't, and has spawned many
rewrites into other languages and imitations such as Infocom's
Zork series, among others. In the Original Adventure source code,
some of the incidents which occur in the game are described in
terms of the database which support the game, and in some places
and events the game generates the descriptions internally without
using the database.
This means that in certain places the game can't be changed at
all, and must end in the same way. It may be possible to change
the database to enlarge the game or add rooms, but it is extremely
difficult to do so and in some extents it cannot be changed
without rewriting the game's source code.
[10].Typically, when used as the name of the game, the word "DOOM" has
been used in all capital letters.
[11].It seemed like about a year; I got a '286 as a combination of a
Christmas present to myself and a gift from family (who didn't
have the slightest idea what to give me for Christmas). Then it
seemed like it was the next year that ID Software came out with
DOOM (which was a year ago as of the writing of this note), and
that encouraged me to buy an 80386 in January.
[12].And as usual, it also raised the level of computer site
Administrator consumption of Maalox, with an unfortunately badly
designed network interface, which caused broadcast streams on
Novell Networks, causing some administrators to ban the game due
to the excessive amount of network traffic it generated. Later
releases of the game fixed this problem.
[13].Current estimates are that due to development of drafting and
editing tools which make the job easier to do, in excess of three
hundred - probably closer to 1,000 - privately designed maps are
available for DOOM. Some of these involve science fiction motifs,
and some represent actual places. Some people have done their
offices. Two groups did actual sites; one did a university in the
Baltic areas (Finland or Norway, I forget which) and the other
used a color scanner to reproduce photographs of Cambridge
University in the U.K. as the actual wall textures in the game.
[14].I find DOOM runs acceptably on a 386/40. Other people take the
claim that you can run DOOM on a 386 the way it is claimed that
you can "run" Microsoft Windows on a 286. You can run it, but the
results will be unsatisfactory.
Robinson [Page 16]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
[15].Additionally, someone wrote code to allow a user who is on a modem
connection with an Internet provider, to use his connection to
start a connection over the Internet to another site, and connect
with another user who is connected by modem there, thus using the
Internet as a bridge between the two players.
[16].I play DOOM on a personal computer using an AMD 80386 DX 40
processor. This is a fast machine in my opinion; it is probably
the equivalent of the entire computing capability of a major East
Coast Ivy League University circa 1960 or so. Some people have
rated a 386/40 at the equivalent of a 360/30 mainframe in terms of
raw processing power.
Given these factors, I find DOOM to be fast enough for my taste.
I tried it for a few minutes on an 80486 processor running at a
Comp-USA where they had it running in the store. In my opinion,
it was so fast it was actually making me nauseous.
Comments on the newsgroup alt.games.doom and its replacement "big
7" groups which are named starting with comp.games.computer.doom.
indicate that many people who play it find it too slow on a '386.
[17].The ability to play in multi-user mode has even caused people to
set up tournaments where four people play either in two teams, or
as four individuals fighting each other, and to even play for cash
prizes.
[18].Most Multi-User Dungeons typically involve a user simply
telnetting into the site and logging on as if it was a remote
computer and he's running an application. This is not a
significant difference from calling up a manufacturer's
computer and placing orders online from his computerized
catalog.
Robinson [Page 17]
DRAFT Game Communications January 16, 1995
Security Considerations
Security issues are not dealt with in this memo. Security issues
will be raised in the discussions and any proposals resulting
therefrom.
Correspondence
Correpondence about the issues raised in this document may be made
to E-Mail address <TRAN...@TDR.COM>.
Author's Address
Paul Robinson
Tansin A. Darcos & Company
8604 Second Avenue #104
Silver Spring, MD 20910 USA
Telex: 6505066432MCI UW
E-mail: PA...@TDR.COM
X.400: S=DARCOS; C=US; ADMD=MCI; DD.UN=5066432
NIC: PR3
Robinson [Page 18]
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