Resets and repops

[Jon A. Lambert]

Please excuse the horrible word wrapping of my earlier posts. 
We have mastered this now. 

> From: Nathan Yospe <yospe at hawaii.edu>
> On Wed, 19 Mar 1997, Jon A. Lambert wrote:
> 
> I have about four levels of programming. The lowest level requires a
> restart of the MUD, though it has the nice advantage of being runnable
> from within the MUD, contrary to Dikus (I have an emacs/pico/vi access
> pipe for top level imms, and failed bootup protection, bringing up the
> last viable mud core when there is a failed bootup, but not the mass of
> areas, etc.) This is, of course, the C++ access layer. The middle levels
> are integrated into the same language, which allows both low level (yes,
> blackboxed) calls to C++ objects and indistinguishable calls to objects
> designed in the lower middle level usage of the language. (Think library
> vs application writers in C++) The highest level language is the scripting
> language provided to animate Characters, usable for NPCs and PCs... a
> quest writer could use this for all of his quest NPCs, and a Player could
> use this for a script to keep his Character alive when he goes LD.
>
Yikes emacs/pico/vi.. I am aiming for a more user-friendly web editor interface. 
My server is also C++.  My high level language is an interpreted script.  I have 
been investigating many others' language implementations since early January.
I am new to compiler theory, but have taken a crash web course in it. ;-)
I have begun to experiment with Lex and Yacc and find them to be very useful. 
Do you know of any similar C++ utilities and if so, can you recommend any?
 
> 
> Hmmm. I use macroscopic event prediction to account for whatever happens
> while an Area is Playerless. Then again, I've got a background in chaos
> mathematics, thermodynamics, nanotech... I tend to think that way anyway.

This is probably the reason I understand only half of what you have
written (grin ..nanotech??).  My background is in western history and literature.  
Though I have managed to get through Hawking's book twice and found it to be
quite enjoyable reading.
Macroscopic event prediction!  This conjures up images of Asimov's 
psycho-history which might be an interesting project in itself.
In your event "catch-up" is there some delay in calculating the state of
an area before players enter?  Does this longer and have more variation if the 
down time of the area is longer?
  
> :> Quite nice. How do you model the Deiatic charis
> Attraction of the gods... the ability of a god to force attraction from
> any mortal. Kind of a touchy issue.

We have no plans to implement this.  At least not the level which
would cause some offense.  I would not rule out physical possession
or the more common occurrence of deities taking the physical form of trusted
friends.      

> 
> Sounds like what I would expect from your Aether/Mass model. Yes, the
> Aether laden witch would be lighter, potentially, than a duck. I want to
> see an overly enchanted sword lift its owner into the heavens.

But don't occurrences like black holes, time distortions appear random
(but really predictable?).  Are you saying that your model can respond to
short duration and completely unpredictable forces.  How does one model
"free will" in a pure physics model?