[MUD-Dev] Introduction System

[Dan Merillat]

J C Lawrence writes:
> Which is why you have to use on-way functions, perhaps with the
> player's ObjectID as a salt.  Unless your namspaces get large (which
> makes cache management on large multiplayer systems a problem) I
> suspect there's not enough value in putting this locally.
> 
> Or are there any *really* cheap salted one-way functions out there?

triple-DES with the players OID as a key.  The server only has to keep
one OID, and mangle it as it sends to the player.

So if Boffo (ID 15023) walks in the room, Buffy sees OID 0xCDa29 and Berny
sees OID 0xFFD10.   It's fast (extremely so!) and not really reversable.

DES crypt (unix passwords) are guessable because A) there's a constant key used
(differing by a few bits of salt) and B) because a correct answer maps to ascii
characters, generally words.

You still lose the ability to do namespace viruses, though.   You also have the
problem that a client crash kills all his knowledge of the world, so you are still
going to have to store a copy to send back to them.

In the end, you're going to put everything back in the server.   A decent
SQL backend (SQL supports sets, so one query can resolve all mappings in a room)
and a good job caching/hashing recent results will end up making it possible.

--Dan



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