From: "Patrick Dughi" <dughi@IMAXX.NET>
Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2000 9:23 AM
> > I would save positions and anything else you feel is important to a
seperate
> > file. Also great for a little world persistance across reboots.
>
> World persistance I'm not quite as worried about - it sounds fun
> to put in, and an interesting challenge, but I'm not sure how much players
> would care - or even notice. I've still got to fix up the database
> access.
I was thinking persistence would just be an extra benefit of saving positions
and other important states to a small file. Possibly a better idea would be
to spawn a very simple "mini-processor" to randomly move simplistic mob
markers around the zone when it's switched out. For example, you pass mob
vnums and locations to the processor when switching the zone out. The
processor keeps track of sets of vnums and locations and moves them around
every 10 seconds in a grid that represents the zone layout, so very little
space is required. It also might be a fun project to try if you're looking
for something different ;)
> > If you switch out objects, you either need to make standalone instances of
> > players' equipment, do selective object switching, or leave objects
completely
> > in memory.
>
> I haven't made up my mind about this. I was tempted to go with
> standalone instances. It does make much of life easier, and I prefer to
> think that I'm saving enough memory elsewhere to have the liberty to spend
> it here. This will be slightly modified by a suggestion from the same
> people who introduced me to the idea of the binary tree world structure, a
> new field - number of items. That way, if you have 20 waybreads, it's
> merely one item with an additional field, combined in the same way the
> mob/obj stacking snippets do. It was pointed out that aside from 12-20
> items for worn equipment, a small number of collected items from the
> current zone, most of an adventurer's inventory is food, drink, copies of
> scrolls/potions/etc. Most characters do not hold 100 unique items.
> We'll see.
I tend to only hold unique items (and trade doubles for things I don't have).
Fear me!
Otherwise, it sounds like a good solution.
> > If you want more bang for the buck, switch out room and mob long
descriptions.
> > That's where most of your memory will be recovered, and you don't
generally
> > search descriptions anyway.
> >
> Another teriffic idea. I'll have to see how this works - though,
> aren't mob long descs still just pointes to the original string?
Right. It may not be a great deal of savings in mobs, but in my experience a
very large percentage of memory is taken up by room descriptions. If you
assume each zone has roughly 60-100 rooms and 15-30 mob prototypes, the protos
could also take up a good bit of memory. Your builders probably don't
describe the mobs in as much detail as the rooms, but given a base set of
generic swithing functions, it may be worthwhile to add mob descriptions.
I suppose it wouldn't take more than a few minutes to find out how many bytes
each is taking up.
Sam
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