[crossfire] Handling massive loot

[Robert Brockway]

On Mon, 22 Mar 2021, Mark Wedel wrote:

> There are a couple ways to deal with this:
> - A thought I had a while back is once a space gets too many items on it, 
> items fall over to neighboring spaces - this would reduce the upper 
> threshhold over that operation (never too many items to examine on a space), 
> but this could basically result in an entire shop being filled to a level of 
> 25 items deep.

I love this idea.  If someone tries to stick items too high they simply 
fall over and spill on the floor.  I'd say that would be a nice addition 
to the game.

> - For items going to the floor, marking the space as needing 'merging' later 
> on could be done (one could even imagine something like a shop keeper 
> standing on the space as this merging is done, preventing players from 
> interacting with it)

I was thinking the first part too.  A kind of 'eventual consistency'.  The 
shop keeper would be a nice touch.

> - Maybe limit the number of items picked up at once, even with pickup all, to 
> something like 25 or other number where performance is still reasonable. 
> This makes it harder to clean up everything in the dungeon, but is somewhat 
> more realistic (you can only pick up stuff so quickly).

I love this.  Maximum pickup could be based on the character's speed.

Sometimes if I don't feel too threatened I'll have 'pickup all' on in a 
dungeon while still fighting.  This way I hoover up stuff as I go.  But I 
do have to be careful not to pass over a very large pile or I'll get stuck 
for a bit.  Limiting pickup all would be a feature and would help 
performance.  Pickup all then becomes "pickup as many as you can" although 
I don't expect a name change.  Perhaps a config option could be put in 
place to allow the server admin to decide on the behaviour.

Cheers,

Rob