A proposition..

Sep 28 09:20 UTC 1998

Dear members,

I am writing this message in behalf of the CRPGA (Canadian Role Playing
Association), of which I am the coordinator of MUD activities. 

We are a non-profit organization, which offers membership to people all
around the world, and arranges thereby a constant stream of info to 
those people, including online games and other activities, to bring 
those people together. 

Across Canada we offer meetings and get-togethers, which are solemnly
organized by volunteers, what means we do not charge any fees and 
solemnly rely on resources provided for free, like GeoCities web space. 

At the moment we are looking for somebody to host a MUD for us. A MUD
(Multi User Domain) is supposed to bring people together, from across 
the globe, and thereby provide some entertainment, fun and of course to 
spread word about RPGs. 

We have currently over 7000 members, which are more or less active. For
those people, who are online, and would like to engage in a talk, or a
game with us, we do try to provide a stable Internet place, but this is
not possible without support. I can not guarantee, that any of our 
members will support you or us in this endeavor, but if you host our 
service, we can make sure, that we do include you in our credits, which 
are spread across the Internet frequently in out mailings, and encourage 
our members to do whatever is in their might to support the service we 
are on.
`
I would like to include some data, which I have gathered while testing 
the MUDs software. (Personally I run it on a Linux Slakware machine, 
with an AMD 486 DX 66 CPU, 32Mb RAM and a 14.4k modem connection to the 
Internet.) 
The software is SMAUG (www.game.org/smaug/) which itself takes up some 
14Mb of physical storage space on a HD. In memory consumption the 
program varies between 4 Mb and 9Mb, depending on the number of players 
and zones/areas included. (Those are average numbers, with approx. 10 
zones and 3 test players included, the number -can- change 
significantly, when both factors change. For example : a 100 zones 
and a 100 players may consume together as much as 30 Mb of RAM. And 
with dropping prices for RAM, this should not really be a problem)

The impact on CPU performance, on the other hand, is minimal, on my 
machine it just consumes 10% -15% of CPU power while boot-up, and some 
.5% -.9% during normal operation. (Values can vary again signifincantly, 
when a huge number of player is online, and is engaged in actions, that 
consume a lot of CPU power, like fighting. Yet, it's unlikely, that all 
visitors to the MUD fight at the same time). Per 10 players an 
approximate increas of 5% of CPU load is to be expected. Again, I remind 
that I am running on a 486 dx 66, with httpd, telnetd, syslogd, named 
and other background processes present.

Along with the initial 14 Mb storage space, the MUD consumes some
approximately 2 kb per player on the HD, and some 2kb to 3kb of RAM per
player online. Data for zones and areas can vary, and be between 20kb 
and 100kb per zones, with an average of 20 to 40 zones implemented at 
one time. 

The data stream is divided approx. 99% upstream and 1% downstream 
(host). The output varies for each user and for each zone notably. A 
good average is about a solid Mb per user per hour for upstream and some 
10kb for downstream. 

Those figures may vary heavily, when the player is engaged in talking 
(chat)and not playing. Then the data is approx. 60-40, with some 100kb 
upstream and some 60kb downstream per user per hour, values may vary 
according to user's ability to type and amount of topics to talk about.

I would greatly appreciate an answer, even if it is negative.  If the
answer is positive, thought, and you might require some additional info,
or any other information, I would be delighted to provide it. 

Sincerely, 
Robert Kowalewski

Suggested visits :
http://www.geocities.com/~phocas/ Internet HQ
http://members.xoom.com/bantam/ Project page

bantam@bigfoot.com
bantam@grax.cyberspace.org

response 2 of 34:

Sep 28 21:40 UTC 1998

A typo, one would assume.

response 4 of 34:

Sep 28 22:36 UTC 1998

*sigh* I can't find the last mud item.  Does anyone know where last spring's
discussion of mudding on Grex is?

response 6 of 34:

Sep 29 02:05 UTC 1998

   The people who entered this item sound like true MUDfolk, and
that would be part of the problem with having this on Grex.  Grex
would be spending more of its time dealing with MUD than anything
else, if this took off.

   I appreciate the proposal that was given; it was written 
stating such things as resoruce usage, which any system admin
would find useful.

   Some technical points as to why this won't work on Grex without
a big impact.

   - Grex is a Sun-4/670 computer, which is a little old.  You
can't just add memory to it with one or two SIMMs, but in lots
of 16 4M or 16 16M SIMMs.  This means that we can't just go out
and get a couple of modern day SIMMs and be done with it.  So
while we can expand Grex to about 1.5G of ram, we have to plan
for that.

   - Given the amount of memory that was talked about for running
the MUD, Grex would have to get more ram to do this.

   - Grex runs on a 128K ISDN link; a bunch of users playing
playing MUD are going to make some impact on the link.

   The disk usage wouldn't be that bad.  Actually, disk usage
might be the only thing that wouldn't be much of a problem. ;-)

   So, I don't think Grex can do this. 


                     * However *

   I think it would be really neat if the author of this item
and his/her friends would stick around and ask questions about
how Grex was formed, because I think that a system devoted to
MUDs could work.  The costs could be minimal per user, if a 
group of people worked on this.

response 8 of 34:

Sep 30 17:37 UTC 1998

It in oldcoop, item 81.  (I don't know how to do a backtalk link across
cfs.)

response 10 of 34:

Oct 1 02:20 UTC 1998

(Against the day when it changes, I'll add that "oldcoop" refers at present
to coop10.)

response 12 of 34:

Oct 1 17:35 UTC 1998

Mr. Kowalewski (bantam) wrote to me and said that he is disappointed in the
response in this item, and would like to drop the idea.  So if anyone wants to
speak up in favor of entertaining this MUD, now is the time to do it.

response 16 of 34:

Oct 7 02:59 UTC 1998

It is certainly not forgotten, nor will you be (in a good way, of course).

Perhaps the first comment was to mention a typo b/c that is easy.  mindlessly
spewing rules or prior decisions is also easy, but we didn't do that.  The
idea was taken seriously, and pros and cons were both presented and
considered, (tho' briefly).  Prior discussion and decisions were referenced,
but not used reflexively as a conversation-stopper.  I hope that, while the
decision did not go as you wished, that you do not come away with a poor
impression of us.

BTW, the mission of Grex is not to get bigger and better computers, but to
build a community.  We have moved to bigger and faster computers when we felt
that it would help us maintain and grow our community, not so that the
computers we run on would give a bigger ego boost to the wonderful staff
members who could maintain them in the face of higher and higher numbers of
users, from around town, from across the state, and then from the depths of
cyberspace.  Don't be too hasty to judge a book by its cover!  :-)

response 18 of 34:

Oct 8 16:33 UTC 1998

Glad you found a place to host the MUD, Robert. Also, I hope you 
consider sticking around Grex and contributing your viewpoints to any of 
the discussion forums here that interest you.

response 20 of 34:

Oct 9 02:15 UTC 1998

might not hear from him agian, based on his last response. but
i could be wrong ....

response 22 of 34:

Oct 9 09:35 UTC 1998

To answer the above statement(s)
I think I'll stick around and spready my nosy comments all over the place, I
like to 'talk', even though I have to admit, that often my comments are
'droppings', but hey, you can't be a Voltaire every day, right?

Misti : I was luckt to get in touch with an organisation, that (Oh wonder oh
mircale) owner's are in the CRPGA, again, good for us ;) The mud will be
located at mud.quadrunner.com port 4000 (Problem is, we are in pre-pre-alpha,
and except the stock nothing's there, but we are working on it.. actully.. I'll
post something else :P )

TS : Dont worry, usually I am stickier than bubblegum to wool cloth.

ER : Well, how can I explain that? I am assuming you have heard of the wonders
of the internet. You know, be here, when for real you are not? To be honest, I
reside in the 'Great White North' so I dont have to log on into grex, I can do
this conference over the net with my www browser.

Sincerely,
Robert Kowalewski

response 24 of 34:

Nov 1 00:11 UTC 1998

do backtalk connections show up for non-reap credits?