Re: CF: trapped in scorn!

[Christian Stieber <stieber@cys.de>]

On Thu, Jul 15, 1999 at 08:12:18AM -0500, David Andrew Michael Noelle wrote:

>     On a very tenuously related note, can someome please tell me what the
> deal is with those "Pocket Reality" chest-looking exits in
> city/apartment/apartments?

[ I did the original implementation of the per-player appartments ]

I just called them "pocket realities" for the fun of it --- the idea was
to make them look like large rooms stuffed inside a small chest. There
is _nothing_ special about them; the doors (exits) just look like chests,
that's all.

Since they almost never add things without messing them up I suppose there
is a problem with the apartment saving code, or the per-player apartment
code.

The original implementation was very simple: all maps starting
with /apartments/ were supposed to be per-player maps, and the apartments
you are talking about used to be ordinary maps.

>  They keep telling me that the
> ".../var/players/[player]/Apartments[n]" is closed.

That's strange --- "var" looks like some unix pathname component, which
should not show up in maps.

>     What are those /supposed/ to do?  Since they're not portable, why not
> just make the apartment beyond the "Apartment Extender" wall larger?

Hey, there just was no problem when I did the first patch :-)

But there is a real reason: we had major problems with stuffed apartments
on our server --- it just takes _ages_ to load a map with hundreds and
thousands of items. Entering the apartment house in scorn, for example,
took a minute or two (freezing the server while the map was loading),
and the server was crawling when somebody was inside that map. Leaving
the map frooze the server again while the map was saved.

This actually meant that the apartment house was just used by one person ---
things would have been _much_ worse if we allowed more than person sharing
the same apartment map...

So I needed two things: each player needed his own apartment (no
sharing of maps), and the apartment had to be split into several rooms
to let people spread their items across several maps --- and that's
just what the pocket realities are.

The per-player apartment technique (which seems to be broken if I read
your stuff right --- I didn't cause the problem, it worked fine as a
patch for several versions) was added for similar reasons: I didn't
want to set up new apartment houses all the time. Since I put the
per-player apartments right into scorn (a good choice back then;
I'm not sure about that anymore since I saw the "improved" scorn)
I was also able to discontinue support for the oldstyle apartments,
since nobody wanted to use these anymore.

Merging items is another great way to reduce server load, esp. when
apartments and Lepred's bag comes into play. I tried to merge all
items that could possibly be merged, but for some reason they never
accepted patches to implement this, so I gave up --- this is why there
are still a lot of items that don't get merged even if they are
identical. I remember the relief when I started to merge bonecrushers
--- one of my players collected bonecrushers (for some reason
bonecrushers are about the only thing I never collected), and used to
have more than 1000 single bonecrushers in his apartment, which
finally got merged into just one "1000 bonecrushers" item.

> Or are they some kind of experiment that is supposed to become
> portable in the future?  That would be neat.

No (well, _I_ didn't plan that. I'm not doing anything with crossfire
anymore, but I hope that nobody is considering adding such
items). That would be a major cheat item --- I have removed such items
from an apartment map I downloaded from somewhere (they had exits and
beds of reality that you could carry around and use to cheat).

Christian
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