Posted by Sometime Player on March 31, 2000 at 14:18:54:
In Reply to: Um... posted by Umguy on March 31, 2000 at 12:22:55:
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> 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?
A few extra lines in a pfile won't make or break you, by any means. With today's computers, this really isn't much of an issue. Any server-side lag problems on a game of this scale are almost invariably network-connection-related. Remember, we're only talking about a few integers here... if lengthy strings like role don't make a difference, this *certainly* won't.