[MUD-Dev] Text Parsing

[Katrina McClelan]

On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Adam Wiggins wrote:

> Then at the top of act(), which is the routine which get called to turn the
> markup language into text that everyone in the room can see, I simply checked
> to see if num_pcs_in_room was greater than zero.  If not, I just returned without
> doing any processing.  This made quite a difference; up until then it had been
> constructing the "You leave north" and "A hobbit arrives from the south" strings
> every time a mobile moved, whether a PC was present or not.
> 

This works, except that you then don't get full information when you snoop
a mob... oh yeah... can't do that in standard diku  ;)  (not that you
couldn't code around this limitation and still "blind" the mobs in
the general case anyway)

> I also staggered the way that things happened; at the time, most all of the game
> updating happened on the "tick" mark (every 60 seconds), which caused a slowdown
> right then.  I made an "object tick", a "character tick", and so forth.
> By the same token, mobiles, which previous updated every 3 seconds (all of them),
> I changed to update every second.  However, not *all* of them would update, only
> about 1/3rd.  I'd just save the linked list pointer until the next second, and
> pick up where I left off.  When it got to the end it would loop around again.
> 

An informative note that this works because the standard game look checks
start time, and end time, and the last thing it does is sleep for the
remainder of 1/4 second.  If your one loop takes longer than 1/4 second,
then you get server side lag.  However if you distribute the computing
over multiple loops that use less than 1/4 second you don't notice the
high load on the client side.  Only adding this because I had a mud once
reject this optimization arguing that it didn't save any CPU time.
Truthfully it doesn't save any computing time.  It does help with
server lag however.

-Katrina




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