[DGD] Where did all the players go?

[Raymond Jennings]

I was informed by a public post from ChrisA that one of the side
effects of a persistent world was a load of junk left behind in
Marrach, including but not limited to heaps of scrolls, and piles of
food items that should long since have decayed.

So there is an issue of what to do with debris from RP that has not lasted.

Interestingly I also find it on point to mention an ldmud based mudlib
called SiMUD, which, being based on ldmud, wound up working around a
lot of missing features in ldmud that were natively implemented in dgd
itself...many of which I wound up implementing myslef once their
admins let me take over as the release engineer.

git://github.com/shentino/simud

One of the features they could have used DGD for was a persistnet
world...and they wound up implementing it with a hierarchial
save_object/load_object structure, plus a few daemons to pick up on
changed .c files.  Was actually pretty amazing to see how they'd
worked around missing what DGD has.

...and as a wizard I had not succeeded in avoiding what seems to have
become an in-joke on their mud.  That of accidentally nuking every
tree in the world.  Seems to have turned into a rite of passage for
wizards.

Thankfully on that note I was able to consult with one of the players
(also the admin's pet beta tester) who was a powerful druid in the
game, and he gave me a very useful overview of the kind of trees that
should be on each part of the world.  That information proved critical
in properly seeding my homebrew "random tree" planter with the
appropriate parameters to restore the flora to what they actually
should have been from the start of the game.

On a related note:

Prominent PCs can often be a GREAT source of information for how
things can (or should) be in the world.  He actually wound up giving
me some much needed help without which I probably couldn't have done
my job as a release engineer.  I felt bad having to confiscate his
heaps of crafted objects, but unfortunately his heaps of objects were
actually causing the mud to crash and error.  I had to put a limit of
100 objects per container to avoid causing the saveload thing I
mentioned in a previous paragraph from choking on an error.  And in
the process, his actions exposed that as a potential DoS avenue that I
was able to patch in the code.

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 7:24 AM,  <bart at wotf.org> wrote:
> For me, it has taken quite some time to wrap my head around the concept and
> implications of persistence. The first thing to realize is there being 2
> different kinds of persistence involved.
>
> - persistent server
> - persistent world
>
> You need the first to build the second, but the fir5st does not imply the
> second, there is value in having a persistent server without a persistent
> world in that you can do updates to the mud without needing 'reboots'.
>
> With regards to persistent worlds, from a classic lpmud point of view, this is
> typically about 'preserving inventories 'between sessions, and possibly across
> reboots.
>
> While those can be useful if not desirable features, this is really not what a
> persistent world is about. On a mud implementing a persistent world, you could
> drop something on some out of the way location, and given nobody walks by and
> picks it up, it will still be there 10 years from now. Not needed for every
> game, actuall not even desirable for some games. But for roleplaying games,
> this can be quite valuable. For games which let players build their own world,
> this is highly desirable. AT any rate, a persistent world also more or less
> requires dealing with 'enforced' decay of things, ie, the house a player built
> should, unless maintained, over time become a ruin, and in due time, 'nature'
> should take it back and return the location to its original shape.
>
> This requires being able to maintain the state of every object potentially for
> many years.
>
> Bart
>
> On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 03:33:08 -0800, Raymond Jennings wrote
>> I probably don't have to remind everyone of Castle Marrach and
>> company taking advantage of persistence and runtime upgrading.
>>
>> I still have high praise for Skotos Tech for those...and I wasn't
>> kidding when I've often said in the past that they've inspired others.
>>
>> Second Contract for one
>>
>> And for antoher, Noah Gibb's very own Phantasmal which I only
>> inherited when he was overwhelmed by real life.
>>
>> Kotaka's inspiration goes without saying.
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 3:29 AM, Felix A. Croes <felix at dworkin.nl> wrote:
>> > bart at wotf.org wrote:
>> >
>> >>[...]
>> >> In all fairness, unless you have been running a persistent mud for quite a
>> >> while, or done live database conversions on a running system or such, its
> very
>> >> difficult to realize what really needs to happen.
>> >
>> > Sometimes new ideas are simply not accepted.  DGD has had persistance and
>> > runtime upgrading for more than 20 years now.  This doesn't fit into the
>> > LPmud view, and probably never will.
>> >
>> > Regards,
>> > Felix Croes
>> > ____________________________________________
>> > https://mail.dworkin.nl/mailman/listinfo/dgd
>> ____________________________________________
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>
>
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