Hello, World. I apologize in advance for the length of this post, though I'd _love_ to get feedback on the ideas here, refinement, etc.
I'm currently hacking away at the ROM 2.4b6 sources, and am contemplating some seriously complex coding, in the attempt to establish a MUD economy. Some of the ideas here may be useful towards establishing an ecology. Other ideas thrown about at random. Some of this isn't very polished, or very well organized. Indeed some may seem completely incoherent. Please try to overlook that, my excuse being that I was really only properly introduced to the concept of a MUD economy yesterday, and started work on this post a few hours ago. Oh, you want a _reason_ to slog through this long-winded post? Okay... **If** I ever get anywhere with the codebase (92 years from now, heh), I intend to release it to the public. Current ROM/etc licensing conditions must be observed, of course. This being my first post to the ROM mailing list, please keep the flames below "charbroil". :) Private replies are finw with me, though public replies might inspire someone else who needed it. Tanks. -- performance considerations Adding an economy like this (largely automated with players capable of having drastic effects on it) has potential to add some very serious CPU overhead. I shudder to think what even a quick stab at ecology might do to a very large MUD or one on a slow machine... Affects on MUD performance will likely be very sensitive to the number of MOBs in use & the amount of redundancy in the supply chain. Memory overhead shouldn't be any worse than adding one or two new large-ish areas. Trying to make everything event-driven would likely help performamce, but would increase the complexity of the model as it stands now, and the level of complexity already frightens me a little bit :) Another dodge might be playing with pulse timers so that the more CPU intensive stuff doesn't run every pulse. Updates for the traders MOBs should be often though, as they have routes to run... --- and on to some methods... Current tracking code only handles hunting for one instance of a MOB, or to a specific player (done by ID number, which is unique to each player and instance of a MOB vnum). Need to add ability to track to an object (type or id) and to room vnums. Need to add player ability to write a (non-magical) scroll (or other obj type) containing arbitrary text. (can make books for each other, etc).
