Posted by Dev on March 31, 2000 at 12:30:15:
In Reply to: Um... posted by Umguy on March 31, 2000 at 12:22:55:
> > Uh, actually I programmed zombie saving into a mud with about a half hour and 30 lines of code. It's not difficult, it's just a matter of balance, I suppose.
>
> Not my point. Those 30 lines of code write to a file, yes? So it's another hard-drive operation, which causes a slowdown (however insignificant) to the system resources. Now imagine you have 100 people logged in, and have to be writing all of those pfiles every 5-10 minutes for the autosaves, plus you have to store zombie info (# zombies, level, hp, damroll, etc, so storing it into a pfile doesn't seem like a good idea, especially if your pfiles have descriptions and roles and such in them). Now add in doing the same thing for every sort of pet/servitor type thing (centurions, etc) and you'll really increase your lag, wouldn't you?
Zombie damroll, hp, and everything else is directly based off the level. The only two pieces you need to know per zombie are level and name. It ends up being an extra 5 lines or so to the pfile, which is really quite insignificant compared to other operations that are constantly being done. In addition, an imm once told me CF uses about 20% of its CPU time, so it's even further irrelevant. It's a question of game balance and a feature the imms don't want to implement.