[MUD-Dev] Text Parsing

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Adam Wiggins wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Matthew Mihaly wrote:
> > Machine has k6 400 processor, w/128 megs RAM. The server is written in C,
> > I believe, but I didn't write the server (I may not have an exact
> > understanding of what constitutes the server, but what I mean by it is the
> > thing that handles the low-level connection stuff). 
> 
> You need more RAM.

Right-o. Ordered another 128 megs today.

> For example, the first thing I did was add a room field num_pcs_in_room.
> This number started at 0, was incremented when a player entered the room,
> and decremented when they left.
> 
> 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.

ahh, that's a good idea. We do SOMETHING like that currently, by moving a
persona to a holding room when they log off, and putting them back where
they were when they log on. Then, we just do a quick check to see if there
are any persona in that room. Your method is probably faster though.

 
> Finally, hardware is cheap.  If you'd rather spend your time improving the gameplay
> rather than optimizing (I know I would), and you have the cash, I'd shell out for
> something more powerful, probably SMP.  Go for dual Celerons, or dual PII/PIII's
> if you can afford it.  (Personally, I'm waiting for my dual K7-800's, although
> I guess I shouldn't hold my breath on that one.)

Money isn't a serious issue, but the problem is that we have a
single-threaded server, so, unless I've been informed incorrectly, dual
processors won't help us.

--matt




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