Monday, March 2, 2009

Why monster spawns must be limited

Monster spawns need to be limited in any game. Originally, Crossfire did not have this limitation. What happens, is monsters can keep spawning and fill up the entire tiled map. While this may seem like fun for players, it is a nightmare for the computer to keep up with all those objects running around the map. What eventually would happen is there would be so much spawn the computer would run out of space and it would crash the server. Therefore, limits need to be put on how many monsters can be spawned a one time. This could be linked to the monster spawn generators. Every generator could keep track of the number of monsters it has spawned and every monster could have mark saying what generator it comes from. The generators could keep track of how many are spawned at once.

I remember one very buggy version of Ultima Online I played where monsters refused to respawn because the generator got corrupted somehow. This would not happen in Wograld as long as we keep the map reset feature, since then the spawn generators as well as all the creatures on that map get completey destroyed, and then refreshed when someone comes back to that area. As long as that feature is kept, the spawn generators should not be getting bugged.

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