[MUD-Dev] Introduction Systems

[Travis Casey]

Kwon Ekstrom wrote:
> From: "Travis Casey" <efindel at earthlink.net>

Apologies in advance, since this is probably going to wind up sounding
hostile.  I'm having a very bad day here.

>> Why?  There's no technical reason why names *have* to be in one of
 
> Personally, I'm not going to go through the trouble to save me a
> couple bits here and there with 20gb hard drives are under $200,
> which even considering worst-case scenarios, leaves me about
> oh... 30k players worth of space, I don't think I'll have that many,
> nor do I want that many.

Well, I wouldn't consider "I think it's too much trouble" to be a
technical reason (which is not to say that it's not a *good* reason,
please note).  I was replying to Ben Chambers' statement that storing
names would require the use of ASCII.  That's simply not true -- ASCII
may be the most convenient way to store names, but if you're worried
about space, there are more space-efficient alternatives.

>> So far, all the calculations seem to have been assuming a
>> worst-case scenario -- namely, that every player has a name stored
>> for every other player.  This is unlikely to be true on a mud
>> unless it's very
 
> Apparently you haven't read the message you replied to completely,
> at the end I suggested only storing the numbers for players who you
> knew.

Huh?  The message you quote is your reply to the message I was
replying to, not the message that I was replying to.  Further, if
you'll look at the timestamps, my message was sent *before* the
message you quote was received by kanga.nu.  I've been trying to get
my FTL networking card installed, but until I do, I won't be able to
read messages until after they're sent to me.  :-)

>> It seems more logical to save a list of unique ID numbers of the
>> players that you know.  In ASCII This would be:
 
> Anyhow, your suggestion for using id numbers for aliases seems to
> limit the number available, I'd probably only store a 3 or 4 bit
> alias id, since it's doubtful people are going to want more than 16
> aliases, or I'd want to store the number of aliases beyond that.

Yep, you could do that.  I suggested 64 since that seemed to be a safe
number to me, but you could, of course, go smaller.  The ultimate
limit would be to require each player to have only one name they use
for introductions; that, of course, would mean that you could get away
with just having a list of the player IDs that each character knows.

Another method that would require more space than numbered aliases,
but less than full names, would be to keep a hash of the name in the
file. This could be used to speed lookups and/or to prevent having to
keep as much of the information in memory.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_     Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-' 
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)
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