[DGD] Persistance

[Bart van Leeuwen]

On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Stephen Schmidt wrote:

> On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Robert Forshaw wrote:
> > >From: Noah Gibbs <noah_gibbs at yahoo.com>
> > >   What does this buy you?
> >
> > It buys me players not coming back some day and finding their characters
> > deleted?
>
> Yes, but why does it matter if they're archived on disk in some
> place outside the mud, or archived on disk in the swapfile? Either
> way they're on your server disk, and nowhere else. Unless having
> them in the swapfile would slow down object access from the
> swapfile, but I doubt that's the case. And if they're in the
> state file you don't have to bother with removing them or
> reloading them when they reappear.

At a certain point I may want to remove a character from the game, yet be
able to archive it to some other medium then the server disk so I can
reinstate it at some point.

Another thing is that I may at some point want to restart the persistent
world without purging all players.


>
> On a somewhat related note, one mud I was at had a Hall of
> Fame where characters who had accumulated a certain amount
> of wealth and experience could have their accomplishments
> permanently records in exchange for purging the character.
> That encouraged players to get rid of their old megapowerful
> characters when they started a new one, instead of leaving
> them lingering. Persistent muds would find something like
> that useful, perhaps.

Sounds very usefull, and something I have seen on non persistent muds as
well.

I think that the problems described are more a game design issue and are
not unique to a persistent mud. In all cases you have to somehow deal
with players that do have an existance in your virtual world but are not
logged on. How you deal with that determines how persistent the stats and
inventory of the character are, but is independent from how persistent
your world is. Having said that, on a persistent mud it makes a lot more
sense to use an object for storing information instead of a file, all a
file buys you is that you can keep the character persistent regardless of
the world.

Bart.

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