[MUD-Dev2] DESIGN: Best way of keeping map and game state information.

[cruise]

Eduardo wrote:
> Hi all,
> I am new in that list. I am interested on developing a MMORPG, just for
> learning and fun. Im at design phase, and i have some doubts about how to
> keep the map and game state information in general. Whithout entering deeper
> in tecnical issues, should i use dinamic databases for keeping all this
> information, updating them in real time, or it is possible to keep that huge
> amount of data in memory. The problem with databases is the I/O heavy load
> so i dont know if it woud delay too much the game ?Someone that have dealt
> with that topic and want to share their knowledge?
> (Sorry for my english if its not too correct)

It really depends on how big your MMO is expected to get - I've run
small MUDs just in memory with write-outs to XML every so often, but
anything with more than a few hundred concurrent players will need a DB
backend.

Don't be scared of the perceived I/O bottleneck - games aren't the only
high-volume real-time data processing applications around, and databases
are generally designed for those situations.