[MUD-Dev] Persistance/stability

[Chris Gray]

[Adam W:]

[Discussion of state saving, in his followup on UO/Graphics MUDS.]

Reading all this stuff on what UO saves and what other MUDs save or do
not save, caused me to realize that I don't really have a grasp of just
what other MUD systems *do* save. This was probably good when I was doing
AmigaMUD, since it didn't occur to me to not save absolutely everything.
I think of it as a persistent programming language (I saw that term a
few years back, probably in a SIGPLAN Notices or something), so you
actually have to go out of your way to make something not saved (you
have to explicitly reset it). When I first joined the first version of
this list, there was a lot of discussion (like now) with Chris L about
databases, commits, and lock/lockless stuff, and that just sort of
re-inforced my notion that other MUDs were persistant languages too.
It's clear that Diku's aren't, but couldn't we consider MOO's to be?
How about Mushes? I believe that Mushes don't save over a reboot (?),
but get the impression that MOO's do. LP's don't, unless explicit
saving to files is done by LPC code. Am I vaguely correct here? What
about newer variants like Island, and things I don't know anything
about like Legend?

Adam also mentioned that most MUDs don't stay up for more than a week
or two. That surprises me, too. I would have thought that LambdaMOO
would have been up for at least months at a time. Given that most don't
save everything over reboots, that sort of corrupts the impression of
a real "world", doesn't it?

[My little server at work has been up for over a month now, other than
when the sysadmin turned the machine off to move it, but it has seen
very little traffic, so that doesn't count.]

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA