Re: Whizzard's adv.t file in progress. Ideas being accepted.


11 May 1995 06:29:19 GMT

In article <3orops$lvg@life.ai.mit.edu>, David Baggett <dmb@ai.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>I'd ask the opposite: what does one gain from not including the code for
>starvation? Your game file will be smaller, yes, but if your game is large
>enough to require special treatment (like _Legend_), the amount you will
>save is proportionally small.
>
>The minimal WorldClass game is about 90K. This is a one-time, constant hit
>--- i.e., more complex classes do *not* produce bigger instantiated
>objects, since all objects *share* their superclasses' code. Pairing that
>constant 90K down in a game that is 640K total seems pointless to me.
>Optimistically, you're going to save, what, 50K?

Hey, 50K is 50K. Besides, the point isn't to make things smaller (or
faster, which is done just by leaving out the really impressive
WorldClass stuff), but to make things easier. Cut n' paste is okay, but
I find uncommenting out a line of text to be so much more, well, cooler,
I guess.

>There seems to be a widely held misconception here (not saying you, Carl,
>hold it): that "bigger means slower". WorldClass games are slower because
>the WorldClass algorithms for things like line of sight and contents
>listing are significantly more complicated than those in ADV.T. It is
>*not* the case that TADS itself is significantly slower with larger game
>files --- I've never noticed much difference, myself. Only PC's need to do
>any swapping of objects in and out of memory, and even this goes away when
>you use the GO32 version of the run-time I built for _Legend_. (Which,
>incidently, I assume to be pretty stable, since only one person has
>reported any problems with it, and this person's machine doesn't like some
>other standard software either.)

Pfft. (For those of you who can't guess who that 1 person is, I'll give
you a hint. His initials are GKW.)

>For the record, I plan to put some flags into WorldClasss that turn on and
>off the costly features. This will give users the option to put the
>library into "standard text adventure assumptions mode", in which things
>should be pretty speedy.

Hunh, well, that's something I suppose. Still, the thought of all that
code just loafing around in my games is aesthetically unappealing to me.

>Finally, if you're planning on writing a replacement for ADV.T, be warned.
>It's a colossal time sink!

No replacement, just a modification. More of an organizational step than
anything. The real fancy schmancy stuff comes later, after Avalon is done.

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