re: Adding more Areas

From: Christopher J. Dickey (cdickey@texas.net)
Date: 07/22/95


On Fri, 21 Jul 1995, Brett Helgeson wrote:

> 1) Yeah it will take a lifetime probably to do. I don't mind. Thats why I 
> am doing it.
Just don't get married.  I understand that eats up alot of time (=

> 3) I am working on some code that will 'toggle' each zone only when 
> someone is in it. I haven't given much thought of it (only a basic check 
> to see if anyone is in the zone for right now).
Well since you think it'll take a lifetime, you probably won't need to 
worry about memory restrictions taking the current speed of technology 
advancements into consideration.  However, what you want to do is done 
pretty easily, and the first step would be to check (as you said) if 
anyone is in the zone, then extract all the mobs and objects from it.  
It's possible to remove the rooms first, but currently, the rooms are in 
an allocated array so deleting it from there wouldn't make a difference.  
If you tried reallocating it to shrink the size of the array, I'd shiver 
to think of the time to change the size of a 750k element array, hehehe.
Perhaps some sort of enumerated binary tree might work (with some 
suffering to speed).

> 4) I am planning on no rent. (You can still rent rooms, and if you save 
> and quit out in a nasty place you could 'die' while sleeping.)
If you're going for that realistic effect, take out recalling too, that 
way they have to walk a few thousand rooms to get where they wanted too.  
You also might consider putting a wait state every time someone moves so 
they can't use clients like tintin to speed walk ;)

> 5) This mud isn't going to be open to the public. Only friends. As it 
> stands, the max allowence of players is 10.
Why?  What fun is it to have a mud that has 750k rooms and not open it to 
the public?  Maybe you don't care, but I get the feeling most people 
reading this are a bit doubtful that you'll even write 100k rooms, much 
less 750k rooms.  You should show off your accomplishment just to let 
people know you actually did it.  Still though, I don't doubt one could 
creat a forest alone that had several thousand rooms, it would just be 
rather boring.  Maybe in some aspects it's neat to say 'wow, I just got 
lost in that 5 thousand room forest and it took me days to get out', but 
day after day of that would get rather dull I'd have to imagine.  On top 
of this, you're gonna need to create an incredible amount of mobs, many 
of which will probably end up being similar, and well, dull.  If you have 
the imagination to create 750k different rooms, and 100k different mobs, 
then for goodness sake, write a novel or something!  However, I would not 
wish to be the one to stop you (of course if you haven't already thought 
of the things I've said, then maybe you shouldn't be attempting this).  
Good luck and prove me wrong.

> 6) Still looking for code for changing the amount of rooms!
The solution was posted earlier, go back and check your email.  Just run 
through db.c and db.h and change the areas where the size of the arrays 
are determined.  Currently, the max size is the size of an int (around 
32k).  By changing this to an unsigned int, you have access to 64k 
rooms.  Beyond this, you'd use long instead of int, for 2,147,483,647 
rooms.  If you run out of the 2 billion rooms you'd theoretically be able 
to access, you could use an unsigned long for 4,294,967,295 rooms.  Of 
course if you could do one room a second, you could fill up your first 
billion rooms approximately 31.7 years from now, so I doubt you have to 
worry about going over the 2 bil limit placed on you by using longs (=
What ever you do, enjoy yourself, life is too short to waste on a few 
billion room descriptions ;)

					CJD



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