Top Mud Sites Forum - View Single Post - Making your MUD less prone to infinite looping

11-06-2003, 07:42 AM

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Having coded on DIKU derivatives for years, I've never found that to be a problem. It takes only a smidgen of discipline to keep from linking the same thing to a list multiple times. Truly problematic infinite loops are usually a lot more convoluted. For example:
a player steps into a nofloor room and enters freefall, eventually landing, several rooms below, in a teleport room with 0 teleport delay that whisks them... right back where they started, to repeat the process.

With more cluttered codebases, codebases with tons and tons of features, it becomes ever more difficult for a coder to perceive all the possibilities. Often, an infinite loop requires the participation of a careless builder. There are diverse ways to make infinite loops with mob progs, despite coded attempts to reduce such risk.

If things are showing up twice in your linked lists, then infinite looping is the least of your worries! ;)

11-06-2003, 07:42 AM	#6
erdos Posts: n/a	[/quote] Having coded on DIKU derivatives for years, I've never found that to be a problem. It takes only a smidgen of discipline to keep from linking the same thing to a list multiple times. Truly problematic infinite loops are usually a lot more convoluted. For example: a player steps into a nofloor room and enters freefall, eventually landing, several rooms below, in a teleport room with 0 teleport delay that whisks them... right back where they started, to repeat the process. With more cluttered codebases, codebases with tons and tons of features, it becomes ever more difficult for a coder to perceive all the possibilities. Often, an infinite loop requires the participation of a careless builder. There are diverse ways to make infinite loops with mob progs, despite coded attempts to reduce such risk. If things are showing up twice in your linked lists, then infinite looping is the least of your worries! ;)