Hello,

I've been working on a MUD game since november, and so far the programming goes pretty well. I have a small chat and can throw in basic commands to perform an action.

But this MUD isn't a multiplayer game how you would normally make one; I decided to make an attempt making a multiplayer game without host application. Instead, all data; that is: The world, players, chatting, gameplay, stories; all of it is stored in a database. The clients just throw queries at it and get data back. E.g. player types "walk west", a query to the commands table is thrown to see if "walk" exists. It does, a reference to what action needs to be performed is thrown back, and then a query to the "rooms" table is made to see if the player can walk west.

As for chatting, the client keeps querying the database every half a second to look for new chat messages. This causes the most wear on bandwidth but that's a small price. For this way I only need a cheap webserver to apply my game online, and not some expensive virtual server that needs to run an application all the time.

However, I have one issue now. How is hack-safety using this method? Can players easily alter the client/outgoing query to hack the game? I have no clue whatsoever on those networking issues, but I hope it's not too easy to hack a client application.

Thanks,
Joozey