[MUD-Dev] Room-based vs. coordinate-based

[Brandon J. Rickman]

On Mon, 23 Jun 1997, Shawn Halpenny <malachai at iname.com> wrote:
>An aside--given:
>Room R at time t=0.
>An earthquake is scheduled to occur in R at t+5.
>Room R is spoofed at t+2, creating R' which now exists in lieu of R.
>Time t+5 arrives, the earthquake occurs.  Are the effects of the
>  earthquake applied to R, R', or both?  Generalized:  are any
>  actions occuring on R to be duplicated on R' and vice versa?
  
>Note:  the spoofing of R and the earthquake are independent events
>and are completely unrelated in cause, execution, and effect.

This is a great example of a particularly bad (and quite common) way of
non-atomic coding.  "Scheduling" an event in this case is like declaring
a prophecy: "There will be an earthquake in 5 ticks!"

I'll go out on a limb and claim that events must always immedidately
originate from objects.  There should be no indirection of events, such 
that an event might be scheduled by an object but actually be originated
as a server action.

In the above, R (for all practical purposes) is the originator of the 
earthquake.  But by scheduling the event at t+5, R has added indirection.
Now at t+5 either the server emits the event only to R and no one sees
it, or the server looks for R, can't find it, and dumps the event.

I'm thinking cold-like frobs provide a way to solve this.  Otherwise a
tighter way of relating the spoofed object to the object of spoofing is
needed.  Then R gets the event and passes it on to it's spoof.  This
would need quite a bit of garbage collection.

- BR