[MUD-Dev] Wild west (was Guilds & Politics)

[Mike Sellers]

At 10:53 PM 12/22/97 PST8PDT, coder at ibm.net wrote:
>  As mentioned earlier I log everything.  Be careful of that word "log". 
>This does not mean that I create text files which record past doings, but
>that I log DB activity amd the event sequences such that any prior point
>in time for that BD can be created __exactly__ as it was then, with the
>addition that that point in time can be rolled forward thru time such that
>__exactly__ the same things as ahppened back then, now happen again.
>
>  Translation:  This is time travel.  You get to see the past in perfect
>duplication.
>
>  As I said, *everything* is logged this way, from NPC actions on up.  The
>criteria for logging is that it was an event which transpired across the
>DB.  Outside of the DB, and I don't care.  Inside, and it gets logged, and
>can later be recreated.

Social engineering aside, what does this do to performance?  It seems like
if your mud was of any significant size and/or you have more than a few
people on, the DB writes alone could grind you to a halt.  How have you
dealt with this?  

And on that note, what's the "state of the thinking" (which seems to
precede the "state of the art" in muds by a couple of years or so ;) ) on
holding world state totally in RAM, writing to a DB via a large temporary
RAM cache, or writing directly to a DB?  RAM-based systems are faster, but
suffer from having "memory loss" in case of an unexpected shutdown (both
M59 an UO suffer from this, to the *immense* annoyance of their users).  


--

Mike Sellers   Chief Alchemist -- Online Alchemy   mike at online-alchemy.com

"One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others 
may despise it, is the invention of good games.  And it cannot be done 
by men out of touch with their instinctive values."  - Carl Jung