[MUD-Dev] RP thesis...

[Shawn Halpenny]

Marian Griffith wrote:
> 
> On Wed 28 May, Adam Wiggins wrote:
> > [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.  [etc snipped]
> 
> I'm not sure I follow this all, but my simplistic idea would be to have
> a list for 'the forest of green shadows' and another list for 'the
> mountains of sorrow'. That should allow more special objects to be kept.
> And if that's not enough you can further subdivide the forest and the
> mountains until you have a manageable number of objects in each location
> in the world, right?

Fundamentally, the abstraction of what you're describing and how things
like
R*-trees and the like are implemented are similar, so you're probably
following just fine :-)  Sure there are gory implementation details, but
subdividing the forest and the mountains to achieve greater levels of
detail where necessary is 
the underlying principle.

--
Shawn Halpenny

"It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so
ingenious."
                                                        - Unknown