[dayrinni]

Those are some good ideas. I want to have some exploration involved so I will be going with the second idea of limiting the view for the players. The staff will be able to see the entire map because the performance issue isn't as major. I will include a toggle for the staff to turn on/off the full map so they can decide what they want to do.

I've done some thinking and know how I am going to handle the front end. Basically, there will be two modes: regular connection (ie: through ZMud or whatever) and then the front end. The default is a regular connection. On the second mode, the front end will send a special message upon connection which will tell the server that they are a front end client. Then the server will know it can send a lot of extra information. This opens up a whole slew of neat things we can do - some you mentioned and showed me already. For example, upon initial entrance into an area, the server could send the map ahead of time like you suggested and then cache it. Then, as the player moves through the area, the server can send the move updates/room descriptions and the front end can handle the map parsing. This would save on bandwidth. So we have some good flexibility here.