[MUD-Dev] The grass is always greener in the other field

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Thu, 16 Dec 1999, Cynbe ru Taren wrote:

> 
> Matthew Mihaly <diablo at best.com> wrote:
> 
> | This is, unfortunately, quite impossible to do in my experience unless
> | your items are all very generic and exactly the same. For instance, aside
> | from the shortsword that newbies get if they go through our newbie
> | introduction, all armour and weapons within the game (well, aside from a
> | couple of resetting quest items) are produced by players, and they all
> | have individual stats attached to them. Aggregating the items would
> | require them to lose their individuality. It's the same problem with most
> | items in Achaea actually. Most things decay with time (whether in your
> | inventory or not), and aggregating them requires losing individual decay
> | times.
> | --matt
> 
> "quite impossible" is fightin' words, podnuh!
> 
> (Hey, I spent a year in Texas once. :)
> 
> I'd guess careful analysis would show that 90% of the state stored
> could be aggregated and shared, assuming implementation sort of typical
> of the current server genre.
> 
> (My apologies if that assumption is insulting.)
> 
> E.g., if some values frequently default to the same value, but may
> -sometimes- be changed, space can be saved by, instead of the typical
> strategy of using a structure field per object initialized to the
> default value (wastefully storing the default value many times),
> instead storing the default value once and using a hash table
> to record which objects have non-default values for the field.
> 
> Slightly slower, sure -- nothing buys you nothing in engineering.

Well, I'm not entirely sure I understand what you are talking about, as
I'm not much of a techie, but from my meager understanding, I still don't
understand how knowing which objects have non-default values will help
with the problem as I stated it. For instance, there are about 6000 vials
in Achaea currently. When you buy one, it will last 250 half-months
(that's about 130 rl days). So, you've got 6000 vials, with their decay
counter set at between 1 and 250. How can you aggregate these, unless they
have the same decay times, without losing the information specific to
them? (I didn't use the example of weapons and armour, as presumably they
fall into the 10% that your 90% excluded, as they have multiple stats that
can and will likely be different for most instances of the armour or
weapon).
--matt




_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev maillist  -  MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev