Distributing MOO-based shared worlds

Intermetrics has created a new MOO server which improves upon previous MOO servers by persistence and concurrency, and by providing a more efficient implementation of the language. Our next version of the server will make it possible to distribute MOO command execution over a large number of machines. In keeping with centralized MOO systems, the system will be exceptionally evolvable. It will allow changes to things such as object inheritance hierarchies, properties and code, and have the changes be visible to every user without them even having to reenter the MUD world. The system will also handle server machines entering and leaving the system at arbitrary times. We briefly describe our new MOO server, and then describe a number of the issues that are involved in creating a distributed MUD server. We describe techniques that have been used by other distributed MUDs and then the approaches that we are using for our own.