What is a room anyhow?

[Anonymous]

Looking through the up-dates I noticed that Arm has 500 fewer rooms this week then last week.  Did a Mek get hungery?  Without any Mudding history beyond Arm, my assumption is that a room is the place your character is in.  Rooms have descriptions and access to other areas in the world.  So if thats the case, what's changed?  Did the staff just erase 500 rooms of the world, or were these rooms just empty slots, taking up space in Ginka's hard-drive?
Just Curious???

Sometimes areas are shifted, removed, updated and thus smaller...
But then again such things are usually noted: I.e. "Tuluk was replaced with New Tuluk" "Tablelands replaced with new Tablelands".

Im guessing it was a far off area that no one went to that mightve been problematic, that they could remove safely without having to inform players because it wasnt a main place of play...

but thats just what they want you to believe.
the truth is the Smurf's are downsizing in preparation for a war with Allanak. Selling off land and whatnot.  

[Ender]

Ever heard of the Nothing?

ATREEEEEYYYOOOO!!!

Oh I should clarify my statement a little bit on the technical part. There are rooms that are then in areas that are then in zones.

Like "The Gladiator and the Gaj Tavern" is a room in the area of "the City of Allanak" in the "Southlands" zone. If they decided to remove the tavern, it would be one less room, if they removed the area probably a big chunk, lets say 1000. If they removed the Zone, itd probably be alot more like 10,000 or more.

So they couldve removed an entire area (which seems to be the case) or individually unlinked and deleted 500 rooms, which seems a bit strange.

[The Lonely Hunter]

Could also be that they went through and cleaned up, I dont know how messy our staff is though :p

If the code is similar to what I've used some chunks can be 'rcreated' instead of room at a time. As time goes on people overestimate or just plain dont use the rooms for whatever reason. Thus, you end up with a ton of rooms reserved or titled but never used. 500 seems a bit much but this could be another explanation. For some at least.

Considering the building I thought was being done, it does seem odd that the count is actually down and not up.

[Eclipse]

Could also be that somebody made a typo when writing it into the update?

[Anonymous]

Ever heard of the Nothing?

ATREEEEEYYYOOOO!!!

Actully, funny you should mention movie and character, the acter that played him is going to be at Dragon Con this year.

But Yeah, I've heard of The Nothing, isn't the ultimate Nilazi Summon that just won't stop moving and growing?

"Why we don't have Nilazi Summons"

Code Select Expand


>ski

Magickal spells

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Summon Nothing                   [mon ]
                               


>cast 'mon un nilaz Divan viod' east
Nothing Happens

>l e

To the east is Nothing.

[Very far]

Nothing.

[Far]

A blue robed templar is here, picking his nose

[Near]
Nothing.

>e (cautiously)
[NESW]

>:blinks
The blank-eyed man blinks.

>l
[NESW]

>
Nothing moves east

>l e

To the east is Nothing.

[Very far]

Nothing.

[Far]

Nothing.

[Near]
Nothing.

>think Now I've done it.
You think:
    "Now I've done it."

>wish all I think I just did a Bad Thing (TM)
Your wish is consumed by the Nothing.

>think Krath!
You think:
    "Krath!"




NOTE: All Logs, characters and spells are fictional, any resembelance to any actual such things are coincidental.  The log and character was pulled from my *ahem* and the spell was created based on the Magick Docs.

[DrunkenSalarr]

That last post was mine, I was timed out while typing it.

~Drunken Salarr

[Savak]

The vanishing rooms are almost exclusively from me removing OLD (already unused) rooms from the database.

In general, we are/were fairly messy when it comes to rooms and zones and objects being created in various and sundry places, which is fortunately not very noticeable from a player point of view.  In this case, the OLD Tablelands was a patchwork quilt of rooms from two different zones.  When the NEW Tablelands went in, as one zone, the old rooms remained in the database -- just not linked in for mortal play.  So, over a couple of weeks I've gone through and manually deleted large chunks of the OLD unused rooms.

This not only helps clean things up from a staff perspective, making searching easier and freeing up room numbers for use elsewhere, but also reduces booting time and frees some resources for the machine while booted/playing.  There are still some room deletions to go, so don't be surprised if sometime in the near future you see another couple of hundred rooms go missing as per the weekly update summary.

-Savak

[YellowCactus]

Thanks for the comments.  I was afraid you were erasing all those metal artifacts buried somewhere beneath the saltflats.  :wink: