🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm attempting to make a multiplayer dungeon game like nethack, except it is
real-time, and it is running on a PC network (NOVELL).  I have a good portion
of the standalone dungeon part done, but I'm to the part of passing some
data to the other players PC's....

My current thinking goes like this:  each PC will need a map and linked lists
of items, monsters/players.  Eachtime something moves/drops/dies the map/list
will have to be updated on each of the other PC's.  I've decided to store
each level in a file when not being used, so when you enter a level the first
thing the PC will do is load level into memory.

Problems:  What happens when a player enters a level that another player is
already on?  Does player 1 save the level to disk, and player 2 load it?  Or
does player 1 send the date directly to player 2.  Since this is a realtime
game, saving/loading levels in the middle of play is restrictive, since on
a large level it might take a second or two.  The second solution sounds better
but since you can't send everything at once (don't want to slow player 1's 
machine down) how do you determine if the data has changed since you started
sending the data?  What happens when 5 players enter a level? (need to keep
it fairly simple)   I could possibly keep all the data in shared files and
update the files, but I'm worried about consistency.  I suppose I could lock
the file, but I fear this would slow things down too much if you had 20 players
or so.

I'd like to stay away from a DAEMON, even though (on UNIX) that would be the
simplist thing to do.  NOVELL requires you to write a NLM, and since the 
server isn't my playtoy...(well you know).  I suppose I could have a dedicated
PC sitting there storing the data and moving the monsters, but I'd like to find
another option.  The dedicated PC would be an 8088 (4.77MHz) and wouldn't be
able to keep up with the players PC (386 16MHz).

Help needed,
Aaron Auseth