[DGD] Persistance

[Par Winzell]

> I'm wondering how useful having a persistant MUD is. I think of it as a 
> luxury, since most MUDS don't have 100% persistance. I also think of it 
> as a luxury to be able to clone and inherit from an object.

It's almost impossible to convey the experience of running a truly 
persistent Mud to somebody who has never done it. So many assumptions 
disappear. The way objects are created, areas designed, everything changes.

In traditional LPMud, virtually everything is an initialization script, 
like the create() function in your example. Half the code in a wizard's 
directory is startup code. In a persistent world, rather than write a 
lot of startup code, you tend to write behaviour code, and configure 
objects.

Most code in a traditional LPMud isn't real code, it's just a cumbersome 
configuration (set_this and set_that) technique. That pretty much goes 
away in a persistent game.

The cumulative effect is that if you design your mudlib to be fully 
persistent from scratch, you will find yourself making subtly different 
decisions on pretty much every single design question that comes up, and 
you end up with something drastically different than LPMud.

Zell

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