[MUD-Dev] New to MUD Dev, need friendly advice!

[shren]

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Jo Dillon wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 10:42:14AM +1000, Byron Ellacott wrote:
  
>> I would strongly suggest that for a MUD you avoid threads, as
>> they will hinder you more than help you.  I say this because a
>> MUD must process things sequentially - you will run into big
>> trouble if you allow a character to start combat with another
>> character while that other character is partway through moving
>> rooms, for example.
 
> Errrrr - this is what mutexes and similar mechanisms are for. I'd
> say MUDs are actually inherently parallel since you have several
> players and lots of mobiles all doing things at once (although as
> mentioned before, having a thread for each of them is most likely
> a bad idea).

Mutexes and the like are not simple tools to use.  I have my first
multithreaded code that I ever wrote.  I wrote it merely by looking
up what the functions did - I hadn't yet had any class or formal
training with multiprocessing.  The code is, by and large, horrible.
It took a design class and a bunch of code writing to finally start
doing threads and processes right.

If someone just wants to write a mud for the fun of writing a mud,
then there's no reason to use threads when you can do without,
especially if you don't already know the ends and outs of
multiprocessing.



_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev