Progressive multimedia MUD system design and performance simulation

MUD (multiple user dimensions) has been a popular interactive system on the Internet, but it suffers from the boring text messages. Multimedia messages have more impact and are more interesting, but they are hard to transmit on the Internet. We propose a strategy of building a multimedia MUD system. In this system, more media can be added to show the description of each room (a room is the basic unit of a MUD system). We also use some useful icons to replace keyboard typing. Due to the huge size of multimedia data, it is difficult to transmit it immediately when a user enters a new room. For a large number of rooms and growth of the MUD system, it is impossible to pre-store all the multimedia files of each room with each client. In our multimedia MUD system, the starting room's multimedia files are preloaded with the client to start a new game. A limited local cache room (LCR) is used to store multimedia files from a limited number of rooms with the client. Under good pre-fetching strategies and local storage management, the LCR of multimedia files will grow locally and satisfy the client's request. We call the MUD system: "progressive multimedia MUD (PM-MUD) system". The "next room prediction rule" proposed, combines a "priority prediction method" and a "dynamic prediction method" to pre-fetch multimedia files from contiguous rooms. The "maximum Hamming distance and the longest time unused delete strategy" are introduced to manage local storage. The simulation result shows the performance of the proposed PM-MUD system.