[MUD-Dev] Room-based vs. coordinate-based

[Brandon J. Rickman]

J C Lawrence (claw at null.net) wrote:
>On 09/06/97 at 05:18 PM, "Brandon J. Rickman" <ashes at pc4.zennet.com>
>said:
>Thanks.  I'll now go scrap a few thousand lines of proof-of-concept
>code and head back to the deisgning board.  
>
> <deeper bow>

Are you trying to hold me responsible for such a rash action?  :)

>>So now we have <N neighborhoods scattered on a plane (or line, space,
>>n-space, whatever).  An object propagating an event only has to
>>propagate in its  neighborhoods (*) (which at worst would be _all_ of
>>them).  
>
>It would seem the rare case where an event would not be propagated to
>all neighborhoods of an object.

Ah, my comment was poorly worded.  It would be a rare case for an event
to propagate to _all_ neighborhoods, to the entire universe.

>>((*) It may also need to propagate in neighboring neighborhoods...)
>
>Actually that level of removal could be many deep.  It may well need
>to propagate to its neighbors' neighbor's neighbor's...neighborhoods. 
>Consider the case of a long set of neighborhoods (a long passage
>containing a line of many thousands of ants).  A message at one end of
>the tube should likely propagate to the other end.  

This is the kind of application that I was trying to deal with, a way to
propagate messages - or radiate events.  But with events the propagation
may be blocked (intentionally) somewhere down the tree.  

>>After trick #1:
>>#1[Shoehorn, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, rabbit1] - #2[7, 8, 9, 10, 11,
>>12]
>
>>Only the folks in Shoehorn's group see the next three tricks...
>
>Which means that 7 and 8 see the trick despite being at the corner
>with 9, thru 12 who don't see the trick.  There's a non-implicit data
>loss there.

One man's data loss is another's noise filtering.  For 9-12, Shoehorn's
trick-event is so much noise they don't need to see.  7 and 8 are in a sort
of transient space, they haven't quite entered one neighborhood and haven't
quite left another.  It is probably an _unlikely and unintentional_ state,
but when it does happen it needs an elegant resolution.  ("Unlikely"
because at any given time any given object probably isn't in two 
minimally intersecting neighborhoods, but there will almost always
be some object somewhere with this property.)  If the event
propagation is clever enough, 7 might choose to filter out a "weak"
event (an event coming from only one/few of the object's many containing
neighborhoods), while 8 might want the extra noise.

I was going to provide a mathematical diversion of how to split up
large neighborhoods but I haven't convinced myself that what I want to
do works.  There's got to be a book on this problem somewhere.

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

- Brandon
ashes at zennet.com