On The Generalization of Servers

At the end of last week nash asked me to give some thought as to how much of a ruleset the RDE could be used to develop. At the moment there's not that much that it can be used for, aside from things like components, properties, designs, resources, or planetary systems and the like. And entire ruleset cannot be constructed from within the RDE. That does not mean that there cannot be, only that at the present moment it is not possible. I have given some thought to the issue, however, and believe that it would be possible to design the majority of a ruleset in a server-independent form if a few things were to occur:

1) A basic set of Order types would be available for use by a ruleset from a server. That is, a ruleset could choose to make use of a stock set of common Orders such as move orders, fleet construction orders, colonization orders and the like. It would also be possible for the ruleset to not use the available orders, or to simply extend and override the base Order with its own.

2) Any new major features (such as resources and trading as seen in TimTrader) should be implemented in a server-agnostic format. Instead of writing the plumbing in Python, as is the case right now, the TPCL language should be extended and exploited. In much the same fashion as Components affect the value of a Property so too could TPCL (or rather, TPSL [Thousand Parsec Scripting Language]) code could be written that allows Producers to generate Resources on a planet and the Consumers to consume those same resources. With a bit of forethought, then, it would be a fairly simple process to put the majority of the processing and functionality of the feature in a server-neutral format which could be stored, edited and tested in the RDE.

Now, certainly not all Orders can apply to all rulesets. And different rulesets will have different variations on the same Order. And it would not be the most efficient thing to do to go about interpreting TPSL code for all of the interesting things that happen on the server. However I believe it should be a goal of the TP project to make the building of new rulesets accessible and easy.

Games like Neverwinter Nights have such a large and active fan and hobbiest base because of the fact that it is quick and easy to create objects or features and share them. More importantly it is extremely easy to use the work that other people have already done in your own efforts. The more Orders that the servers can provide for use by rulesets by default the quicker rulesets can get up and running. If the ruleset needs functionality that isn't already present then it can be put in manually, hopefully to the benefit of all the other rulesets as well.

The same applies to features. Making resources, for example, accessible and easily sharable would make it more likely for people to make an effort at starting a creation of their own.

Anyway, those are my two cents (or rather, two ideas). I'm sure there's plenty that I haven't considered, but it seems to me that there a bit of an opportunity being missed in some ways.

-Fro