Resets and repops

[Chris Gray]

:[Chris G:]
[deleted]

[Adam W:]
:Hmmm.	So that means that any object which has ever been seen by any
:player who is currently online is always treated as active?
:Seems to me that this rather kills the whole optimization you were
:trying to achieve in the first place, if you've got a fair number (50 -100)
:of players and a medium sized world.

Hmm. You've got a point there. Needs more thinking.

:I find that with enough RAM, your processor speed is irrelevant.
:Most of our mobiles do "burst" processing.  Although they _do_ consider
:their options every second, most of the time this consists of "no change,
:keep doing what I'm doing."  Only very rarely (in terms of mud cycles)
:do they actually _do_ something.  That is, a mobile sees that it's 5pm
:(quittin' time!) and executes the section of its script which says hang
:up my apron, walk outside, lock the door, find the easiest path to the
:nearby tavern, go there, order a meal.  Once that is done, they then spend
:a while sitting there eating the meal, which is essentially like doing
:nothing.

Sounds about right. The test NPC's I was using are deliberately coded to
do lots of stuff. They wander randomly every 1-3 seconds, picking things
up and putting them down again, and will engage in combat if the opportunity
strikes. [During testing I found that they are wonderful money makers -
just dump a bunch of them in the combat area, and some will survive long
enough to reap a *lot* of money. Then go in as a maxed fighter and kill 'em
off (a nuisance since they keep moving around) and get the cash. It's
pretty pointless, but amusing.] I guess for more realistic NPC's with
jobs, etc., the load would be quite a bit less. I think its the wandering
that does it to my system, since that keeps loading new locations into
the database cache. I'll have to try some that just stay in one or two
locations most of the time, but are still fairly active.

:Well, it tends to happen more when you get real players.  They think of
:things immediately that you would never have.	The first time I remember
:this happening was when we brought a couple of our friends on to do some
:alphatesting on the combat system.  One of them (being a bit perverted)
:saw a hobbit boy and typed, "remove pants boy".  Of course, the boy was naked
:anyhow (hadn't gotten around to making gear load on things yet), but he
:got a message like, "The little boy slaps your hand away" or "squeals in
:outrage" or something.  The guy goes, "Woah!  You guys thought of
:_everything_!"  I was just as confused as he was until I remembed that it
:checked to see if the character was allowing body contact from non-trusted
:characters before it even checked whether he was actually wearing anything.

Grin!

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