[MUD-Dev] Text Parsing

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Greg Miller wrote:

> Basically, some AOL guides who were unpaid volunteers became disgruntled
> with AOL as a whole and filed a class action suit on the grounds that
> all non-profit organizations are required to pay minimum wage. For a
> game, you could argue that whatever they're doing is for their own
> enjoyment, but if you give any compensation to them, that would probably
> look like work to a court. I found it highly alarming since, at the
> least, I planned to accept donations without getting nonprofit status.

Man, that's ridiculous. Some friends and I volunteered last weekend to do
some work widening trails on our favourite hiking mountain, and
afterwards, all the volunteers were fed free food. That sort of thing
happens all the time in volunteer work. Blasted idiot government. 

> 
> > particularly large game (I'm not sure how easy it would be to influence
> > this sort of thing with 1000 people on at once).
> 
> Since you raise the subject, how many do you typically have these days?

Well, lately we've been averaging a bit over 1000 user hours a day, which
comes out to an average of 41.6 people online at once. We generally peak
around 75 or so (though two weeks ago, we peaked at about 55). Actually,
we've realized that we can't handle more than 75 or so online at once, due
to speed problems, which sucks.

Actually, on that note generally, I have read some talk on here, in the
past, about how some of your servers can handle a LOT of users online at
once without having speed problems. How the heck do you manage that? We
use an interpreted engine (which I realize is inherently slower), with its
own custom language and and some hard-wired databases for convenience
sake. I suspect that our player routines (mainly movement) tend to be
significantly more complicated than most muds (again, mainly movement, due
to the enormous number of database searches that need doing to check for
all sorts of stuff everytime someone moves), but I don't think our mobile
ai is particularly complicated, although currently mobiles do things
regardless of whether players are in the room (such as wander about, sleep
to heal if wounded, gather items they find, etc).

We think we're going to have to convert to a UO-style system where we
split upt he land geographically and run the different areas on different
servers. That SEEMS, to my not-very-knowledgeable-self, to be something
that we shouldn't have to do just to get past 100 players online (i figure
I can squeeze out another 33% performance from careful optimization).

Can anyone tell me if this seems normal to you?

--matt




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