Work continues on Perenthia and my PBBG Engine. I think I got the core PBBG engine framework complete, at least complete enough to start porting over the content items from Perenthia. My goal is to get a small area working with a few items, monsters, etc. before I port over the entire database.

I am hoping to improve performance in this new version as well as complete several of the features I didn't get implemented in Beta 1. The engine uses a lof of in memory objects while still persisting the world to the database. Running a lot of this in memory will eat of memory on the web server but will hopefully improve performance in regards to interactions from users. The main bulk of the places or rooms will be loaded up into memory when the application starts. Along with this load will be a load of NPCs and items located in towns and designated areas. Then, whenever a player logs in and begins playing their player object will be loaded into memory as well. At regular intervals the world state will be updated and player objects persisted to the database. Inactive player objects will be saved and then discarded from memory until the next time the player logs in.

Loading these objects into memory will keep the database connection initialization and IO traffic to a minimum and help speed up actions such as moving around and engaging NPCs. Since I don't know of anyone actually doing this I'm not completely sure it will work. :) My testing so far is working great and at most I may need to beef up the RAM on the web server.

I am still planning for a January release of Beta 2 and depending on how that beta goes; a full release in the early Spring.