[MUD-Dev] Time Discontinuous MUD

[Ling]

And here's another thought!  (they come once in a blue moon)

Probably 99.999% of all muds run on a 24-hour basis, 7 days a week from
the mud's conception until the thing dies.  Players, however, don't seem
to abide by those rules.

Ever considered running, say, three muds on one server?  Timesharing at 8
hours each, going in a round robin fashion.  Each mud writes out its
database at the end of its run then restores the entire thing as it was on
the next stint. Technical advantages might include not having to be
airtight with memory leaks. :)  In addition, patches/updates can be
applied whilst a particular mud is offline. 

The three muds could (should) all have the same theme, just that the
userbase for each is different.  With the exception of the set of users
who want to play in a period that has the server switching muds.  They can
just go play on another server which runs the same policy at a 4 hour
offset. :) 

Why?  My main reason for having this thought was that it's annoying, as a
casual player (when I do), to have other people with more time to sink
doing lots of exciting things whilst I'm offline.  Then again, I also feel
that players logging on/off as they please is an issue I absolute hate as
a game designer (both for game mechanics and for the theme, tho I think
I've sussed it out). As for having the character scripted whilst the
player takes some zzz's.  Doesn't that put a limit on the player coz of
her programming skills? 

  |    Ling Lo
_O_O_  kllo at iee.org



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