[MUD-Dev] Unique items vs. item references

[Dave Rickey]

From: "Vincent Archer" <archer at frmug.org>

>   - DAoC: Similar to AC. There might be a bit more different
>   templates to play with, but they look individual. The advent of
>   spellcraft (soon, very soon) shows that items can be
>   individualised and altered to a very large amount (adding
>   "buffs", particle effects, "procs", etc) at the player's
>   convenience.

This is not quite accurate.  Some fields are saved on a per-instance
basis, some it is taken from the template object.  For example, the
name of an object is always taken from the template, while the
material grade is tracked for each instance.  Magical enhancements
used to come from the template, now they are saved per instance to
support Spellcraft.  Memory and storage space isn't really the
issue, internal memory bandwidth is.  If 2/3 of the record isn't
going to change from one instance to another (for example, every
weapon of a type has the same name, model, and damage/delay
setting), you can improve performance this way without the
inflexibility of a strictly indexed system.

The one bad part is that every time we want to change what is saved,
the entire character database on each server has to be converted to
use the new format.  This adds about an hour to the time it takes to
patch.

--Dave



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