Well, before I trot of to get some more sleep (3 afterparties in 3 days, ergh...), I figured I'd ask about this little issue regarding design I've been having....

Basically, I'm trying to do one of those "MUD" games over a website - the reasons being TELNET is boring, and I've already layed down a wad of cash for webspace I'm not yet using.

Now, I've seen this kind of thing before -- and have a pretty reasonable idea of what would be involved, but, well, some more opinions would be nice

I'm thinking:

• The user logs on, and click the big, shiny "Play Now!" button
• They are then directed to a page where their players' stats, an output and input window are visible.
• When they enter a command, I do some fancy AJAX/Javascript work and send a request to a server page.
• This page then updates everything in the vicinity of the calling player and attempts to process their command.
• The response is then sent back to the client, where formatting is done.
• Rinse, repeat.

My main concern -- apart from the stability of the above -- is speed. Will I be able to get crap going fast enough merely using PHP & Javascript? I can imagine running a few connections fast enough, but would it be enough for an entire game?

I guess I could go CGI Scripting instead of PHP if that's possible with AJAX. Then again, the server I'm on only supports Perl, which I've never really liked. Unless you can do CGI with C++?

Anyway, discuss, abuse me, etc, etc - thanks for reading!

-Lycaon.