[MUD-Dev] Event handling

[Maddy]

On Fri, 9 Jan 1998, Shawn Halpenny wrote:
[Snip]

> - Bubba drinks a vial of poison whilst relaxing in a local inn and he
>   has his poison bit set for the next 20 minutes--the arbitrary
>   duration of the poison (implying that an event is immediately
>   scheduled to ripen in 20 minutes that will unpoison Bubba).  
> - game is shutdown/crashes/etc. 3 minutes later.  No events are saved.
> 
> Our intrepid hero logs back on 5 minutes post-crash and some weeks later
> realizes that the poison he swallowed long ago is still with him
> since the unpoison event has disappeared.  

Well I guess it depends on how the effects of the poison occur - but I would
have imagined that for an average 'reduce the hps' kind of poison there
would be an event going off every n minutes?  Which obviously would get lost
in the crash too.

[Snip - lots more "what-ifs"]

> The above were my prime motivations for keeping all game objects in
> the game until they are removed from the DB (i.e.  no longer exist). 
> I suppose it is possible to log the player out, but continue to let
> any pending events have their way with Bubba's player object, but
> what if the poison kills Bubba while he's logged out?  What happens
> to the body?  His inventory?  What if the vial Bubba drank wasn't
> poison but was a slow-acting agent that gradually caused the imbiber
> to come under the complete control of the person originating the
> potion?  

Well one of the things you could do is make it so that the off-line player
is semi-immortal and very lucky.  They suddenly become slightly immune to
the effects of poisons and attacks until they return where upon they become
like normal mortals and suffer again.  This gets around the problem of
players logging off cos something bad has happened - the "bad thing" will be
waiting for them when they return - but they won't come back to find out
they're dead, mutilated, robbed and strewn liberally about the local
countryside.

Maddy