[MUD-Dev] Population container

[Brandon Cline]

On Thu, 19 Jun 1997, Wout Mertens wrote:

>Instead of having all that trouble of having to constantly update your
>objects, even when noone is around, I present:
>
>The Population Container
>
>What is it? Well, you take a kind of monster that you want to populate a
>zone with. Now make a population model, something like Fibonacci's row or
>so (rabbits!), and update the model every once in a while.
>Now, if a player is about, and he 'spots' one (or more) of the population,
>decrease you population by one (or more) and make the appropriate monster
>appear.
>
>This way, you can have zillions of flies, musquito's, dwarfs, etc etc, you
>could even describe the critters from the container (some dwarfs are
>lurking about) (tho I think that's a bit farfetched), and all with
>virtually no memory or cpu overhead.
>
>That's it.
>
>Thoughts? Questions? Ideas? Stuff?
>
>Wout.
>
>

Ya, at times I can see where something along this lines could be useful,
especially in a world base where you want to accurately repressent a
"popualation" of creatures, or of an area, without actually creating each
idividual mobile.  You could even go so far as to apply disease, economy,
and reproduction and the like to the "model".  Would be nice  for a
non-static world where mobs don't load in the same spot everytime.  And it
also saves memory when no one is present in the area.  Like Wout said, you
would also then be able to represent the millions of insects, furry
creatures and other minor creatures in the game, that have high
population, but only a few individual creatures of that type seen at one
time.  I think what I'm tryin to say is good idea Wout. :>


Brandon L. Cline
brandon at sedona.net