Garg. Using MySQL for ROM is simply useless unless you want things viewable via internet, which, is useful in itself. It makes it easy to search, sort, show, and many other things. Replacing it to make your file i/o easier is just wrong! Wrong I tell you! I want everyone, right now, as you read this, go to the MudMagic code repository and get the DemonDance codebase, or go to shadowstorm.wolfpaw.net and get the Shadowstorm codebase and look the loading functions from those, (its like olc_save_new.c and there's one file for rooms/objs/mobs too) you'll see how easy it is to make it so adding to area's/rooms/objects/mobs in the flat files easy. All it is, is a huge re-make of the saving/loading functions to work exactly as pfiles do. Makes it very easy to read, minipulate, etc. So if your intent is to install MySQL for this reason, don't! Eeesh!
I'm currently working on a C++ codebase which grabs -everything- from the database in real time. Now don't go telling me this is going to have so many queries. Who cares. We are in a age of 3.0ghz+ machines, with 1gb+ of ram. It can handle tens of thousands of queries a day (It has also been optimized muchly to keep certian things in memory), and even more. Take a look at MudMagic, how many hits a day does it get a day? Several thousand or so? Maany queries there, I assume anyways. My attempt was to include mysql into a C++ codebase seemelessly using templates, and such, I have made it so *ch->name; grabs the players name from the db, and puts it right there, letting it act as a string (or int or what ever is needed). And so far, its been great fun and a wonderful learning experience. Another attempt was to make everything real time. All a copyover would do is update the code, the players would not even feel a second of lag, because there would be no boot time. Things are saved/loaded as things are done to them. -This- would be a reason to impliment a database into a MUD. Real time is a blessing. It will include featers for an web creation, a powerful webmin which will include several OLC features, if not all. - This is a bit off topic for the ROM list, I know, my intent here is to state what a good reason is to use a database. So all in all, my statement is, if you use a database, you want it to be for something useful, like real time, or web implimentation, not something like easy file i/o, thats just ludacris! There is also no reason to try to dump down your ram usage. The most I've ever seen a MUD take up is about 26 megs of ram, and we are talking a massive flat-file archive on this place. If your Wilderness is taking up more than 2 megs, optimize. I can point you too two places that have multi-million room wilderness with all those ooey gooey features that you want and still use less ram than the actual area's themselves. Virtualize my friends, virtualize! ... I'm done my rant. Davion
