zone idling

From: Andrew Davidoff (dert@concrete.resnet.upenn.edu)
Date: 10/26/95


we wrote zone idlin' pretty quickly, theres not much to it.
if the zone hasn't bin toyed with by a player or a mob from another 
zone, after a length of time, it's removed from lists (rooms remain).
this only works well if you have builtin memory management, otherwise 
you really wont see an improvement except perhaps in speed. when yer 
world is larger than, say, 5000 rooms, you may notice a difference in 
processing by reducing all those global list scans. of course, if you 
write code that doesn't utilize global scans then you wont have the 
problem in the first place. shrug, again, unless you have yer own 
memory routines, it really aint werth it. you lose some capabilities 
(unless you spend another day or two writing replacement functions) 
such as:
using summon/astral/portal/etc to idled mobs
using locate object
if you opt to take out rooms, you'll also loose footprint arrays or limit
yer first_step BFS searching routines...
given the spam over this code, i just thought i'd encourage you to 
think before writing it...
-dert



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