From TRANSACT@tdr.comSun Jan 29 11:58:57 1995 Date: 19 Jan 1995 13:39:21 -0500 (EST) From: Games Transactions To: sci-virtual-worlds@uunet.uu.net Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds Subject: RFD: Proposal for networked games This is a proposal dealing with games and the future developments in connections among such systems. Comments on this issue are invited. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Network Working Group P. Robinson Internet Draft Tansin A. Darcos & Co. Expires: July 20, 1995 January 19, 1995 Overview of Game technology 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. If such a standard for transaction-based traffic exists, other applications may be able to use it, and server programs to handle processing of multi-user games may then be possible. This draft is updated to clarify some questions from the first issue. Robinson [Page 1] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 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 "I wanna know what [it] is... I want you to show me..." . . . . . 5 "Show me your papers..." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 "Keep on..Pushin'..." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 "..The map only tells what {could} be done..." . . . . . . . . . . 6 "Ladies and gentlemen, we are in hell." . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 "Because you're pushin' too hard, you're pushin' too hard..." . . 7 "I feel the need... I feel the need for... speed..." . . . . . . . 9 "Prepare for Descent..." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 "...Grab what you can get..." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 "Going Out For Business" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 "I'd tell you everything, if you'd pick up the telephone..." . . . 10 "That doesn't count..." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 "In the forseeable future...[traffic] would not get any better..." 11 "Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night..." . . . . . . . . . 11 "Advantage..." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 "...this proposition we're gonna lay on you..." . . . . . . . . . 13 Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Quotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Correspondence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Robinson [Page 2] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 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 10, 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); - Transaction management, including comitting of records and possible rollback of failed transactions; - 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 Robinson [Page 4] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 1995 they are making money at it. "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. "I wanna know what [it] is... I want you to show me..." (h) I will give examples of three recent games of which I have exposure through playing. [6] Wolfenstein 3D set "the standard" in what is now coming to be referred to as "virtual reality". This was the first game for the 80x86 processor family to provide very high level graphics. That was then added upon when the same company went further in game development with the creation of the game DOOM, which pushed the state of the art even further. Then along came an even more significant advance with the release of the game Descent. I will explain in general what these games were, what they did and how each one helped pave the way for the next one to come along. Unlike, say, the idea of the spreadsheet which was a radical new development, these games are simply major enhancements of ideas that were already in existence in various forms, and that many of the developments in these games are not new, but have been around for a while. "Show me your papers..." (i) 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. [7] 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 Robinson [Page 5] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 1995 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'..." (j) The Wolf-3d series of games pushed the state of the art. Some of the features (granted that some of which are not new) included: - 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; [8] - enemies that don't attack until they see you or hear you 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. The amount of a turn could be as little as 1 degree as opposed to the typical full 90 degree turn to the left or right of other games. 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. [9] "..The map only tells what {could} be done..." (k) 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. [10] Robinson [Page 6] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 1995 This meant that if the map format could be figured out, new games using those maps could be created. Because the game uses keys and secret passages, the game could be used to create a puzzle, a maze, or entirely different maps altogether. And people did exactly that: a number of people created add-on maps to Wolf-3d that provided such features as - 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, [11] came out, as is explained below. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are in hell." (l) About a year after Wolfenstein 3d was out, [12] ID Software stuns everyone in the community by raising the state of the art in computer games by creating the game "DOOM". [13] 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 to earth, or die trying. "Because you're pushin' too hard, you're pushin' too hard..." (m) In including 360 degree pan visual effects started in Wolf-3d, DOOM again pushed the state of the art. Some of the features in DOOM include the following: - 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, or even kills 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 or even death to anything Robinson [Page 7] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 1995 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; - a floor that can lower suddenly, giving the appearance as if it had collapsed; - single areas which are not the same height, and a restriction on how high a person can climb up, 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 very interesting simulation of three-dimensional space; while no two areas can be on top of each other, and thus the game is a two-dimensional mapping of three- dimensional space, typically the difference is often unnoticable; - 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. [14] It also required an 80386 processor as the minimum platform it would operate upon. [15] 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. [16] ID Software also released a version of the game which uses a medieval format and adds a few features including the ability to fly and look up and look down. This game is called "Heretic" and is otherwise very similar to DOOM. Robinson [Page 8] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 1995 "I feel the need... I feel the need for... speed..." (n) 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. [17] 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. [18] "Prepare for Descent..." (o) The envelope just got pushed even further. Starting with the idea of high-quality graphics first started in DOOM, and the concept of flight simulators, another company, Parallax Software, created a new game called Descent, that also provided many of the features in prior games, and added new features. Some of the most notable features include: - different light levels; - ability to throw flares to increase the light in a dark area; - odd shaped rooms including rooms with sloping floors and ceilings; - "glass" displays that become inoperative and 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 that if you are the target, and even if you run or evade, the missile continues to track and follow you; - "Bouncing shrapnel" effect in which even if a severe or killing level damage missile doesn't hit you, when it hits a wall or another object, its explosion generates Robinson [Page 9] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 1995 flying and bouncing shapnel which in and of itself can be of severe or killing level damage for considerable distance beyond the blast site; - continues the ability to play the game standalone or in 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. In fact, one of the people listed on the credits for Descent is the head programmer for ID Software. "...Grab what you can get..." (p) 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" (q) 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..." (r) 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 Robinson [Page 10] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 1995 all traffic that is being sent via the Internet. "That doesn't count..." (s) This does not even count the games that are already running such as Multi-User Dungeons and other facilities. [19] 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. It has been noted that a protocol involving lots of textual traffic such as occurs with a MUD or Adventure game is not the same as the small, frequent binary packet data as occurs in a networked game. True, but one advantage could be to have a generic engine, have the host send down a series of text responses that can be invoked in place of a value, and whenever that value appears in a fixed message, replace it with the text. This means that, for example, a 500 byte message describing an area might be reduced to 50 bytes of replacement message traffic. This would reduce the amount of traffic being sent. "In the forseeable future...[traffic] would not get any better..." (t) 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..." (u) 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. Robinson [Page 11] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 1995 For example, DOOM supports up to four players. Many people play in one-on-one 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. To correct a misunderstanding, let me make it clear there are two types of servers which I am considering in this document. The first would essentially be a form of "router" in which it simply passes packets generated from any party connected to the application, to all other parties connected to the application which are accepting incoming packets. The second is a host computer running some type of game application that keeps information about the player's statistics beyond the time the user is connected to the host, typically in a database file. In this second method, users might, for example, have ships and resources on those ships, that they build up either through attacking and looting other players, or by attacking computer- generated ships, or by doing commercial transactions with various services that perform these features, or by building things that create objects that can be sold or bartered. Users might have one or more bases or planets to store objects, resources and wealth, or to create same. Such a game of this type might involve dozens or hundreds of players and go on for days or weeks as people log on for a time, play for a while, log off and come back later. A game might run for several weeks, or might continue until some fixed event which is decided upon by the operator of the game or its players. "Advantage..." (v) The advantages of developing a system of this kind are many. In the case of a game in which a host site simply passes packets between users: Robinson [Page 12] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 1995 - 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; - Some site that sends a lot of traffic between local users can install a local daemon to handle the traffic and reduce packet traffic going outside of its local system. [20] In the case of a game in which a host carries bookkeeping information about users, any and/or all of the above could be possible, and in addition, the following apply: - 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; - 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. "...this proposition we're gonna lay on you..." (w) 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 Robinson [Page 13] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 1995 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 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; - List and/or group of packet types and classes; - Authentication and verification, assuring the validity of the transaction and its accuracy; - Defeating or minimizing the possibility of replay and playback, as well as spurious transmissions; - Comparison of most significant need in transactions; does the application need high accuracy at the cost of retransmission delays, or does it need packets as fast as it can get them at the cost of losing older packets; - Providing for possible compression of data transferred and reduction of traffic generated; - Analysis of what compression is appropriate in an application, if any; - Providing for the type of connection, either continuous during the life of the game, similar to Telnet, or reestablished each time, similar to Gopher and WWW; - Are there other forms of datagram or TCP/IP service such as a new form of connection protocol more appropriate for this; - Would some of this work help the work on or be helped by developments in multicast transmissions; - 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 14] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 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] Foreigner, 'I Wanna Know What Love Is'. [i] Typical dialog from many movies dealing with Nazi Germany. [j] Impressions, 'Keep on pushin'. [k] Arthur Hill, "Andromeda Strain". [l] William Windom, TV Program "Twilight Zone: Five Characters in Search of an Exit." [m] 'You're pushin' too hard'. [n] Tom Cruise, "Top Gun". [o] From the description of each mission in the game Descent from Paralax Software. [p] Kris Kristofferson, "Rollover". [q] Sign commonly used at places that want people to think they are closing, to indicate they want to do more business. [r] Electric Light Orchestra, 'Telephone Line'. [s] Jack Warden, "Used Cars". [t] Burt Lancaster, "Airport". [u] Beginning of the motto of carriers of the U.S. Mail. [v] Comment indicating a tennis player is ten points ahead of the opponent. [w] John Amos, "Let's Do It Again". Robinson [Page 15] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 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 reduce the use of petroleum, as was the claimed reason for the imposition of these limits, but to intentionally underset the reasonable and safe speed for a particular road so that more people can be sited for speeding and fined, thus using the rules as a way for local jurisdictions 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, "The Soul of a New Machine." Robinson [Page 16] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 1995 [5]. Later video games that were more complicated and more expensive raised the price to 50c per game and 25c each additional "life". [6]. Perhaps too much exposure. One time I was on business at Washington National Airport during August of 1994, and saw that Mr. Steven Breyer was being sworn in as a member of the Supreme Court. I posted a message noting that I was unaware he had been nominated. Someone reported back that there were hearings all during the month of July, was I unconsious? I then stated that I had spent most of my free time during July playing DOOM, on more than 250 privately designed maps I had downloaded from the Internet. Thinking about it, I admitted that in essence I probably *was* unconsious! [7]. 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. [8]. 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. [9]. 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 Robinson [Page 17] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 1995 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. [10]. An example of this is in the original Adventure game, the much ported Collossal Caves which runs on virtually any computer which supports a Fortran Compiler, and has spawned many imitations. In the original source code, some of the incidents which occur in the game are described in terms of the maps 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. [11]. Typically, when used as the name of the game, the word "DOOM" has been used in all capital letters. [12]. 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. [13]. 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. Robinson [Page 18] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 1995 [14]. Current estimates are that due to development of drafting and editing tools which make the job easier to do, in excess of three hundred privately designed maps are available for DOOM. Some of these involve science fiction motifs, and some maps represent actual places. Some people have done maps of 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. [15]. 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. [16]. 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 or "router" between the two players. [17]. 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 rec.games.computer.doom.* indicate that many people who play it find it too slow on a '386. [18]. 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. Robinson [Page 19] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 1995 [19]. 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. [20]. Some larger sites that run Internet Relay Chat service have put their own client on line in order to reduce the amount of traffic from, say, twenty users generating lots of small packets to the IRC client generating one large packet. Robinson [Page 20] DRAFT Game Communications January 10, 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 . Author's Address Paul Robinson Tansin A. Darcos & Company 8604 Second Avenue #104 Silver Spring, MD 20910 USA Telex: 6505066432MCI UW E-mail: PAUL@TDR.COM X.400: S=DARCOS; C=US; ADMD=MCI; DD.UN=5066432 NIC: PR3 Robinson [Page 21]