On Thu, 4 Nov 1999, Daniel P. Sniderman wrote:
>
> A decay feature would require each item type to have a
> decay rate associated with it (I don't think it's
> reasonable to have all items decay at the exact same
> rate). Each INDIVIDUAL item would have to have a date or
> some sort of variable to track it's decay state. Verant
> is already struggling with the size of the database.
> (Hence the change to decay time of duplicate corpses)
When were corpse decay times changed? I thought only the time
you had to get an experience res was changed? AFAIK, they
still last 8 hours online or 7 days offline.
Unlike UO, there's a limit to how many items each character
can have. You have your personal inventory, bank inventory,
worn items, and that's it. Assuming you have all your
inventory full of 10 slot backpacks and chock full of items,
that's 160 items per character. Call it 180 to account for
worn items. Assume all 8 character slots are used in this
manner. That's 1440 items per player. Assume 5000 players
per server all doing this, and that's 7.2 million items as a
close-to-worst-case scenario. If each item has 1k of data
associated with it, that's roughly 7 GB. My PC's hard drive
is bigger than that.
> The one Loot once would have a similar type of major
> database change - codewise even much trickier. Lore is
> pretty easy - just check what you have. Loot Once would
> require a historical database of every item a player ever
> looted.
There are only a thousand or fewer "named" mobs with special
drops in the game. If you assume 5000 players per server, and
a 1000 mob bitfield, it's only 5 megabits, or about 625k of
extra data for the entire server. I made a similar suggestion
to the UO dev team (for different reasons) and the problem
there was that this stuff is handled via a high level
scripting language; so you can't have a bitfield - a boolean
takes 1 byte minimum, probably more. I agree it would be a
monumental task to graft it into the current system. I was
thinking more in terms of future games (in case anyone on the
list finds himself as a programmer in such a game :).
The other problem with the loot-once idea is that once you've
looted pretty much everything, there's nothing left to do
except help other people get their stuff.
--
John H. Kim
kim@...