[DGD] Object house-keeping and persistance

[Stephen Schmidt]

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 birgit.schulte at philips.com wrote:
> I am wondering about ways to make sure the number of unused / discarded
> objects in a persistant mud doesn't go through the roof.

This is a comment more from the perspective of game design than
of mudlib design, but hopefully the latter follows from the former.

In a persistant MUD, why would there be a discarded object?
Maybe no player is carrying it, but it's got to be lying
around in the game world somewhere. Unless it's actually
been destroyed, but in that case it should be removed from
memory too. Or if it's been destroyed by turning it into
some other kind of object (the monster body turns into a
monster corpse, the Ring of Power turns into a puddle of
slag) then the old object gets deleted from memory and
replaced by the new one.

I think the way to deal with this is by controlling the
creation of new objects very carefully. In a really, really
persistent world, new objects would -never- be created, at
least not without being transformed from old objects. For
example, to forge the sword, you have to have the lump of
iron, and when the sword is created, the lump of iron is
destroyed, leaving total objects in memory unchanged.

Of course, if players are in the habit of leaving swords
lying around the lib, and you can't create new ones, then
the stores may run short. There will need to be some way
to find abandoned objects and return them to circulation
somehow. The old clean_up() type mechanism could be put
to this use in a persistant framework. In any event, I'd
want there to be a system within the game concept of how
items get recycled in this fashion. What that system would
be would depend on your game concept.

Or are we, perhaps, talking not about objects within the
game, but about objects like daemons that are not visible
to the players, but come in and out of existance to handle
certain tasks behind the scenes? In that case, delete the
suckers from memory when their task is complete.

Steve


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