[DGD] Persistance

[David Jackson]

On Wednesday 26 December 2001 11:24, you wrote:

<SNIP-PRUNE>
> of the issues that really interests me is this: If a world is
> persistant, so that objects are expected not to vanish and reappear
> causelessly, then what happens to a player character when the
> associated user logs out? It seems to me that the PC should still
> have some kind of passive existence in the game even when the
> user is not connected. Precisely how to handle this is not clear,
> and would vary from game to game anyway. A mundane solution is
<SNIP-PRUNE>

I think player-owned houses would go a long ways towards maintaining a 
passive persistence.  However, I don't think there's any need to present any 
sort of explanation for a player leaving the game...IMHO...it doesn't detract 
from the immersion.

One of the beauties of a persistent world is the ability to change variables 
and have those variables retain their values over reboots.  This offers all 
sorts of possibilities.

<SNIP-PRUNE>
> Further, it's not clear to me that the usual model of wizards
> extending the game world would necessarily be appropriate for
> a persistent mud. If the world was persistent, yet wizards
> could clone new objects, there is a problem of open-ended
> expansion that would have to be resolved in some way. There
> ought to be some in-game-world mechanism for resolving what
> happens when an object is destructed. It also seems that expansion
> of the game world would be more troubling in a persistent world
> than a non-persistant one, though not fatally so. One might be
> able to do away with wizards in the usual sense, and allow players
> to do more of the manipulation of the game world, within constraints
> imposed by the persistence of the objects in the world, and presumably
> limits on how new objects can be brought into existence. One would
> want to think carefully about game world ecology.
>

Yes, I agree.  Persistence presents the problem that you have to stop 
tinkering with the code after a point, unless you wish to break existing 
objects which already exist in the world.  Without some kind of robust 
upgrading routines, which is what I think Kevin suggested.

It's exciting to think what persistence could bring to a MUD.  Players could 
be allowed to change the landscape - but wisdom tells us that players aren't 
always going to be thematically correct, and sometimes they are going to be 
sloppy, poorly described, with typos and grammatical errors.  If you put 
restraints on what they create, the other problem is that newly-created 
objects, after a point, will seem stale and generic.  I think that this is 
the obvious reason for having "wizards" - wizards you can reign in with 
design standards.  Players are not so easily controlled.

> I think I may have taken a thread that the author intended to
> be about coding objects, and diverted it into a discussion of
> game design :)  But I really believe that, if we change the
> software rather dramatically by introducing persistence, then
> we ought to think about whether the games that are built with
> that software need to change as well, perhaps equally dramatically.
> Certainly it is not obvious that the game model should remain
> unchanged.
>
> Steve

I had hoped that someone would introduce a thread regarding game design on 
the DGD list - particularly to take advantage of the unique strengths of the 
DGD driver.  

Here's my question - state dumps should be performed at intervals, in case of 
crashes, and should also be performed when you manually shut down the MUD.  
Is there a generic function for performing a state dump?

David Jackson
Mystic Visions
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