Distributed Server Idea

[cavedude]

You can already run world and zone on different machines, even over the net. I do it myself all the time. You just need to point the zones to the IP of the machine world is on. Then, you need to allow access of the zone server to the MySQL database. (I usually limit it to user/pass AND IP) You're still at risk by opening MySQL to the net, and there is nothing you can really do about that.

Your idea still suffers from the problem of if that single world server goes down, that's it until it's back up.

Also, by distributing pre-modified versions of zone, you'd pretty much have to open the MySQL server to everybody instead of a select few which is a big NO NO.

[Damilis]

Hmmm, I though that zone.exe wont run without the db.ini file in the same directory...which means you just handed out a username and password to the database. if you custom code each zone.exe to have individual userid/passwords and then set MySQL to accept only a specific userid/password on a specific IP (with the exception of packet sniffing or decompiling) shouldn't that secure the setup?


and yeah, the world.exe thing has me thinking... possible to code in a 'look for backup world.exe' into zone? hmmm.