The Walled City Project

Requirement Specifications

Peter 'darkewolf' Crystal

   darke@it.net.au
   
Daniel 'danpat' Patterson

   danpat@danpat.net
   
Robert 'rmt' Thomson

   robert.thomson@studentmail.newcastle.edu.au
   
   The requirement specifications document for the Walled City Project.
   This project will implement a "metaverse" which gives an unified
   environment for its users. Both to conduct work and social events.
   
   FarReach: The Walled City is Copyright 1998--200 Peter Crystal and the
   Walled City Team.
   
   There is little to none at the moment.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   Table of Contents
   1. [1]Project Specification
          
        [2]Project Scope
        [3]Reason for a distributed system
        [4]An example new-user experience
     _________________________________________________________________
   
Chapter 1. Project Specification

     " WalledCity is a distributed architecture for the same reasons
     that the web is. "
     _________________________________________________________________
   
Project Scope

   We aim to create a 'world' system that takes todays ideas of MUD's,
   the Web, IRC, email, etc, and encompasses them in one environment
   which seamlessly allows access to all these services.
   
   Interaction with the system can be done via any number of different
   mechanisms (textual, graphical etc), and no loss of system
   functionality should result from using a certain type of access
   mechanism.
   
   The environment is staged on multible distributed (geographically)
   servers, where individual users can provide their own 'worlds' which
   link into the 'overworld'.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
Reason for a distributed system
     _________________________________________________________________
   
An example new-user experience

   Upon loading Walled City the MUE (Multi-User Environment) for the
   first time, the user is presented with the tools to create and manage
   his person, and his home world. He hasn't connected to any other
   Walled City MUE's as of yet. He need not have a network connection at
   all. The user will have a graphical interface to the MUE, with menu
   bars, popup windows, and wizards for some common tasks.
   
   Once the user has created his person and his first room, he may
   connect to another MUE. She can type in the URI of the MUE, or he can
   choose from a default list, which would be comprised of our main
   servers. Once he is connected, he can enter the other MUE via one of
   the many public entrances, or he may specify explicitely where he
   wants to go. At this time, the person he created (his body, anyway)
   would appear at the destination. The user would see the location no
   different to how she sees her own local rooms, except for the slight
   inherent network lag. She could then move around the foreign MUE and
   do things with the foreign objects. If she finds a beach ball, picks
   it up, and comes back to her own MUE, assuming the beach ball and the
   foreign MUE give permission, the beach ball will come too.
   
   So now the user has one uplink, the MUE they connected to. They don't
   want to connect to a different MUE manually each time, just to visit
   the rooms. They'd like to follow a link on the foreign MUE and wind up
   at another MUE altogether - without necessarily having to spawn
   another network connection. If the user were to be stuck behind a
   firewall, for example, the other network connection may be disallowed.
   So the MUE should be able to forward traffic from the user's MUE to
   another MUE which the secondary MUE has connectivity with.

References

   1. file://localhost/tmp/@4438.2#AEN36
   2. file://localhost/tmp/@4438.2#AEN41
   3. file://localhost/tmp/@4438.2#AEN46
   4. file://localhost/tmp/@4438.2#AEN49