|
Look a little more closely at your cable and DSL providers: you'll notice that they're advertising ASYNCHRONOUS bandwidth, which means that the upload and download rates and caps will be different. Cable usually is sold as up to 3Mb down, 128k up which means if you use your home machine as a server, you'll have 128k worth of upload to give your players. If you're serious about this not becoming a big game, that's probably plenty; text bandwidth of the MUDder type isn't all that much.
C is a nice programming language; generally speaking it is relatively simple (common place of contention is that pointers are hard to understand; stick with it, they become intuitive after a while). What you'll find is that while a language is simple, transferring an idea into code is a horse of a different breed.
There are a ton of snippets out for ROM, some of them worthwhile, some of them not. If your game is based more on RP and world-creation rather than built-in code to add functionality (such as a redeveloped combat or clan system, revolutionary design in world construction from the code level, etc) then Rom26 has OLC built in, there are probably snippets for crafting and the like (I know nothing about these things, but like I said, snippets are in abundance), and once you've got a fair approximation of the code you want, start building.
As for having other people log in remotely, you'll have to learn a little about networking and its basic principles. If you get Cable, and you can make sure that nobody else is going to put a computer on your network, hook your linux computer up to the cable box directly and you should have very few problems (figuring out your IP address so you can make it available to people, knowing how to check it so when it changes you can keep them up to date, etc. is crucial); but this is an undertaking not to be done lightly.
The simplest way is to find someone who'll code in what you want, buy hosting from Kyndig, Wolfpaw, Betterbox and the like, and make it simple for yourself. But if you're an aspiring network/linux/server administration junkie like myself, then the do-it-yourself method becomes more fun. Nothing is free in this undertaking, and the tradeoff is usually some money or a lot of time.
-Visko
|