[DGD] Dworkin's mudlib

[Par Winzell]

Mikael Lind wrote:
> The above poses a problem for a game. The scenario is a mud with rooms
> (represented by POs), creatures (POs), and items (LWOs). If a creature
> enqueues a take-action for an item in a room, where the take-action is
> stored in the creature, and the take-action references the item via an
> object reference, and the take-action is to be executed during another
> execution round, then the item will be duplicated, which is
> undesirable. I am also thinking that the same problem would occur in
> many similar scenarios.

This is an argument I remember having with Dworkin many years ago. I 
never quite escaped the feeling that the way persistent objects work 
right now is an incredible blessing for anybody who wants to handle 
inventory the way we traditionally do in the LPMud world. We're 
supremely guaranteed to avoid duplication, which is something that 
plagues virtually every other game that implements inventories using 
more general data structures.

There's no shortage of tasks for which LWO are just right. I'm just not 
sure persistent object replacement is one of them. I don't quite see the 
point; anything that has a physical existence in the world is going to 
have a reference to it from its environment anyway, so the LWO isn't 
going to garbage collect anyway. Is a LWO that never leaves really so 
much less of a resource strain than a persistent object that it's worth 
the hassle?

Zell