So this idea of hiding your data you're going to reveal in some form eventually is a fool's errand. Programs have always existed to do this, and programs that not only do that but also make sense of the data are always improving and are quite sophisticated these days. Note though that screen scraping is the maximal difficulty you can achieve you can't make it harder on the programmer than just grabbing the art off the screen as it's rendered. using a binary format instead of, say, JSON. There are things you can do to make it harder for a programmer to extract the data: e.g. You can do all the fancy data encryption you want at the end of the day, art is going to be displayed on the screen, and programmers can extract it. However there are always those desperately afraid of others taking their artwork or their DS and using them on their own projects, possibly even making money from it! DEP has chosen to cater to these people (probably because DEP's mindset is artist-based and artists typically get uppity about copyright), but it's an impossible problem. Most dream creators are happy just to have someone visit, let alone stay around. Here we have an impossible problem, in a certain sense. This set of data is fairly small it shouldn't be expensive in storage space or bandwidth. Some should be writable by the user, some writable only by Furcadia's server. Much of this can be readable by anyone, some should remain private. The first is per-client data, such as username, and various statistics. (Though that doesn't make it easy.) There are two main things Furcadia needs to keep track of. (If only 1000 people are on, you don't need the resources that 4000 users might need.) The money spent on the specialist will pay for itself in server cost savings over not a very long time.Ĭonsider P2P. If you're incompetent in this area, which it seems like it from the outside, hire a specialist to rewrite it from scratch, making use of Amazon or another elastic server provider so you can scale. Just what are they doing that makes it expensive to handle a mere 4000 people at at time, max? I'd be scared to look at their server architecture. The primary concern, then, should be optimizing for server cost. I'm pretty sure this has been stated by the creators numerous times, and I know they all have jobs outside the company because the company doesn't let them live an American lifestyle by itself. The primary expense, above all else, is the cost to run the servers. Let's do a simple cost-analysis of Furcadia, without going into hard numbers. Let's start with DEP's (Dragon's Eye Productions, the company/people behind Furcadia) business model (I may occasionally regress to a 'your' in this post, meant for DEP). This is why I classified this post as a rant and blog fodder. I wouldn't put 95% certainty on any of them but I'd be surprised if I was really far off the mark. I'm going to make a lot of assumptions and guesses, based on things I've heard, read, and experienced. It helped improve my writing and imagination, it helped me meet my best friend and others I still talk to frequently, it was a nice, creative form of entertainment that ascended beyond mere point-and-click first-person-shooters. This game has been around since the start of 1997. Look at their statistics on the front page. And it's been dead for a long time, at least 4 years.
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