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BatMUD Forums > Ideas-wanted > Re: init outworld on startup

 
 
#1
25 Aug 2014 14:10
 
 
How much boot time / memory consumption would increase, if all outworld room
were initialised on startup instead of lazy initialising? ( Currently for
instance outworld mobs appear only when you walk into or 1 room away from a
mob).

The benefit would be that it would be much more pleasurable to play in those
situations where you need to find certain types of mobs in the outworld. Also
the fabled special stick of detecting outworld resources from many rooms away
would work properly.

++glaurung

 
Rating:
15
Votes:
15
 
 
Glaurung
3y, 101d, 11h, 10m, 36s old
Level:
81
 
 
#2
25 Aug 2014 19:44
 
 
Glaurung wrote:
How much boot time / memory consumption would increase, if all outworld room
were initialised on startup instead of lazy initialising? ( Currently for
instance outworld mobs appear only when you walk into or 1 room away from a
mob).

The benefit would be that it would be much more pleasurable to play in those
situations where you need to find certain types of mobs in the outworld. Also
the fabled special stick of detecting outworld resources from many rooms away
would work properly.

++glaurung
I respond to this well-thought-out post because of its number of upvotes.

Sadly, the answer will have to be "no". As powerful as our current processor
is, the task asked for here is just too daunting for it. Let me explain.

The new continents are much larger than the entirety of old BatWorld. Even if
you were to exclude no-go rooms such as the deep sea, you're still talking
about a 500-by-500 square for a startup block. Including, as asked for, the
monsters inside it. This would be at least 250 thousand game objects in rooms
alone, easily upwards of 300k if you include monsters, the items the monsters
carry, exits, weather effects, etc etc. For one continent.

As of this writing, there are under 200 thousand objects loaded into the game,
including EVERYTHING from all continents, dungeons, quests, guilds, and of
course players. And we're pushing 20% CPU with that.

In order to add all outworld rooms to our startup cycle -- one of the most
stressful times for our CPU -- we'd probably need an hour and a half (and
that's conservative) reboot time, and the lag would grind everything to a
halt. We'd need a processor far, far stornger than our current model to make
this even close to an option.

Trust me, I wish it wasn't this way. Loading all outworld rooms at once would
solve a bunch of problems, including a few you don't even know about. But it's
just not possible. Sorry.

Shinarae "uptime" Lluminus

 
Rating:
3
Votes:
3
 
 
Shinarae
A r c h w i z a r d
3y, 8d, 11h, 19m, 48s old
Level:
200 [Wizard]