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

[Cynbe ru Taren]

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.

 Cynbe



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