>mcclient is a proxy that that compresses in the background.

That answers that question. Thanks.

>You are right in that it will not be useful for the broadband
>users. But dialup users (yes there are still a few out there)
>do experience a client side decrease in latency.

Here's what I don't get. My understanding of latency is that it represents the time required for a given bit to travel from the server to my client. Bandwidth, on the other hand, is the number of bits per unit time that I can receive. Compression, then, might increase maximum bandwidth, but I'm not sure how it would decrease latency.

That's why I mentioned the compression in modem protocols. If it's already taking place, then the MCCP compression would only come into play between the server and a user's ISP. The link from ISP->User is already compressed by V.90 (or whatever).

>The server is also reduced in ongoing bandwidth.

This seems to be where the main savings would come into play. As Phaelim pointed out, you trade CPU cycles (doing the compression) in return for decreased bandwidth, which might reduce the cost required to host the mud.

For what it's worth: there seems to be a patch vs. ROM 2.4b4 that adds MCCP support. Obviously Carrion Fields has morphed considerably since ROM days, but it would be a good starting point if anyone wanted to work on it.

Apparently zMud has built-in MCCP support. If this ever gets implemented on Carrion Fields, I might try adding built-in support to yTin. I hate proxies.

Another question for mingx: When you connect to a MUD using a client that supports MCCP, is there an easy way to know whether your connection is using MCCP?