[MUD-Dev] MUD Design Fundamentals (Was: Looking for books...)

[Jeff Kesselman]

At 03:19 PM 8/28/97 PST8PDT, Ola wrote:
>A late response..
>
>coder at ibm.net wrote:
>> On 19/08/97 at 09:55 PM, Ola Fosheim Gr stad <olag at ifi.uio.no> said:
>> Many, not all, of us here are discussing creating full worlds with no
>> concept of object or world resets.  As such persistance of objects,
>> and object changes are implicit to the world design.  The base
>> assumption thus changes from "save what we have to" to "everything is
>> saved by default, explicitly not-save what we don't want".
>1. even minor changes in datastructure may require a wipe, or some
>extra    coding effort

No, not if your data structrues are rerepsented themselbves as data in the
engine ala Cold or Smalltalk.  This is akign to the 'realtional databes"
oidea where everythitgn is stored as tables, ebven the sturucture of the
data itself.

>2. reloading may not give you what you want, it is easy to make blunders

Hm? I dopnt follow you.  If it is stored and then reloaded the only time yo
ushoudl see a differnece is if ther eis a bug i nyour findemental engine--
and that shopuld then be fixed.

>3. fixing a bug in the code may not be enough if the bug is present in
>   the stored structure.
Youa re darwing a distinctio nbetween code and stored strcutrues. neither
Cold nor Smalltalk do.  The data is write-through cashed.
>
>etc. I only have some experience with persistence, maybe there are
>approaches that are better, but I know for sure that I wouldn't rely on
>persistence alone in any long term project.

Then youve onyl used very BADLY designed or implemented persistance mdoels
IMO.

JK
Jeff Kesselman
Snr. Game Integration Engineer
TEN -- The Total Entertainment Network -- www.ten.net

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