[MUD-Dev] Moore's Law sucks (was: 3D graphics)

[Chris Gray]

[Brandon Rickman:]

[Good things:]
:- having a large and divers world to explore that can be affected by players

:Things I don't buy that have not been proven successful:
:- wholesale ecological/economic simulation

Aren't these tied together quite a bit? If the large and diverse world is
to be non-static (i.e. not just a bunch of empty rooms), don't you need a
lot of NPC's wandering around in it? They may not be driven by an explicit
economy or ecology, but they have to be there, and be affected by players.
They in themselves require a lot of horsepower to run. Treating them as
an ecology is probably less CPU intensive (possibly muchly so) than just
having many individual NPC's with simple behaviours. The sum of the
behavious of a lot of NPC's will likely end up *being* an ecology/economy.
By making it explicit, you can likely get away with higher levels of
simulation for a lot of it (parts there are no PC's in).

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