Zugg Software :: View topic

Beginner Joined: 12 Mar 2003 Posts: 14

First off let me post my machine specs as I suppose it's relevant.

AMD Athlon XP 1600+ processor
1,024mb pc2100 DDR memory
64mb DDR video card
120gb 7200rpm Hard Drive
Windows 2000 SP3
Latest version of MDAC

I am a visual basic .net programmer so I always run the latest version of mdac.

Now for my observation. I have noticed that zMapper runs nicely for what I would consider very small maps (less than 2,000 rooms) however when you create maps with 32,000(plus) rooms as I do for my mud it becomes so slow that it can literally take hours upon hours to recolor rooms, or delete rooms if need be. I assume this is because of using the access database for the map's data, however I also know that searching or even deleting 32,000 records really should not be THAT slow (as you can open the database in access and delete the records quite quickly in fact which is what I've resorted to for deleting rooms). I was wondering if anyone else has noticed the performance hit, and whether anyone was looking into optimizing the database routines to possibly correct this?

In closing please allow me to say that even though I am complaining about the speed, zMapper is by far the easiest, cheapest, and best solution out there for mapping areas for muds.

Keep up the good work!

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Yeah, I think you'll find that zMapper will be a whole lot faster when Zugg next updates it... he's been doing a lot of optimization in the zMUD mapping module which shares a lot of code with zMapper itself (or I should probably say the other way around). Either way, when Zugg recompiles zMapper I'd reckon that there will be a giant speed increase for larger maps :)

I'm not sure when Zugg is next going to focus on zMapper though... I think he's probably got to get zMUD 6.5x released as a public version and then do a zExplorer update... but I'm just speculating, he'd be a much better answerer for both questions :)

-- Rainchild

Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2003 6:31 pm

The zMapper update will be done at the same time as the zExplorer update. So, after the zMUD public release, which should be within a few more weeks.

And Rainchild is exactly correct. The current zMapper doesn't have any of the recent speed optimizations that I've been testing in zMUD. So, once zMapper is recompiled, you will see a huge difference.

If you've used zMUD, the current zMapper is equivalent to the zMUD 6.39 beta version. So it doesn't have any of the improvements that were even made to 6.40.