[MUD-Dev] RP thesis...

[Adam Wiggins]

[Marian:]
> Why not make the ashes of that bonfire a very real object in that
> area that will be present in the room every time that room is re-
> created. Of course you also have to make it decay over time but
> that's something I find in most muds anyway.

Right.  The trick is, of course, that you just store a general description
of the world (things like terrain and elevation), and then *changes* to
that.  Things like tracks, campfires, objects on the ground, sigils
carved in trees, local mana depletions, and so on are stored as lists
rather than arrays.  If you only have one campfire, you only have one
item in the list.  You can limit the list from growing too large by
simply having things like tracks and campfires decay, objects get picked
up, sigils get healed over.  If you have limited RAM to work in (hardly
a problem with RAM prices these days, but in case you're a starving
college student or something) you can always artificially limit things -
if the number of stuff on the map grows too large, generate a rainstorm
to wash out tracks and campfires.  (Kind of like the alien ship in
Operation Overkill ][ that would fly down and pick up every object on
the map when it exceeded its maximum size, but hopefully more subtle.)