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

[JC Lawrence]

On Fri, 26 Dec 1997 14:04:48 PST8PDT 
Vadim Tkachenko<vadimt at 4cs.com> wrote:

> JC Lawrence wrote:

>> Another approach of courae has making all logs public and
>> un-editable.  It then becomes difficult to define any action
>> derived from log contents as improper as that data is know "in the
>> puiblic domain" as it were.

> [Following this post and some subsequent]

> This creates a significant IC problem - more often than rare, you
> _may_ have to reach some agreement with your group
> members/allies/enemies against other enemies/whatever, and keep it
> secret. This _IS_ a roleplaying, isn't it?

Actually no.  I'm a GoP'er, not an RP'er.  I don't particularly
distinguish between IC and OOC, and don't expect my players to either.

> Now, if you make all the logs available, none of your actions are a
> secret anymore, and to keep having fun may be problematic.

True.  Secrecy efforts however are another, different payoff.  If a
character wants to keep something secret he has to work very hard to
keep it so.

See the post of a couple minutes ago on the limitations on time travel.

> BTW, the logging mechanism is pretty sophisticated to prevent it
> from introducing the performance penalties to the engine -
> basically, in the main thread I just perform inexpensive operations
> (like queuing the log message) and then perform all expensive
> processing in the background with a minimum priority.

For me it all happens at the DB level, which is a collection of about
6 - 8 threads which maintain the DB, the cache, various event lists,
etc.  Most of the logging comes as a side effect of commiting a new
object state to the DB.  The rest (the SAY and TELL handling) is a
side-effect of the IO calls generating new object states.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
                                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
----------(*)                        Internet: jc.lawrence at sun.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...