[DGD] Could it work...

[Stephen Schmidt]

One small comment on a post with which I am otherwise in complete
agreement...

On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Par Winzell wrote:
> Going persistent is a big deal. When you're persistent, you realize, you
> will never again cold-start your game.

I'm not sure I'd want to define "persistent" that strongly. I have
in mind a game where the goal is to become emperor of the continent,
or something like that. It would require some development of the
game world (building castles and so forth) and the game might run
for perhaps six months to a year before someone achieved it. When
that happened, I'd reboot the game to a blank slate and have them
start again.

I would refer to a game like that as "persistent" even though it
would not be infinitely lived. It would have the essential feature
that one could make changes in the game environment that were,
in effect, permanent, in the sense that they would last until
the "plot" of the game was finished. But you would get to reboot
every once in a long while and deal with little issues. Of course,
if you had a crasher or other big issue, that wouldn't do.

This is a comment on what we might mean by "persistent" and on
the type of games we might be able to create with DGD that we
can't create with other drivers. I'm not disagreeing with Par
in any way about the technical difficulties of coding a
persistent system, whether we define that as infinitely lived,
or in the somewhat broader way I'm suggesting here.

Steve

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