I ran across a situation in a grid-zone today which brought up a question that had never occurred to me before.
According to help zedit-advanced:
Code:
Let us say you want there to be a single rose loaded in a garden. But, you
want to have a max of 50 in the mud. You would simply go to the command options
menu and tell the zone file to load an object into the room. However, the object
will continue to load into the room, until it is maxed. To prevent 50 roses
from loading into the room, simply hit N for new command. It will ask you where
the command should be placed. Use the SAME number as the command which loads
the rose. This will bump the command, which loads the rose down. Then you will
be at a command options menu. Enter R for remove an object from a room. If no
one comes along and gets the rose, the game will remove it and load another
one. This will prevent build up.
Okay, these are very good instructions. I use this help a lot. Now comes the situation:
Often, people use items from different areas. I've changed some shops because if the mudowner uses the zone but not the zone that holds the object sold, errors come up because the item doesn't exist. I sometimes copy the object or remove it from the sales list. I haven't done many of the shops in the donated zones though so if you're seeing errors when the mud reboots, keep this problem in mind.
I noticed a problem with one reset and did a CHECKLOAD on the object. This tells me all the places where the object is zedited. This is the outcome:
checkload o 5027
Checking load info for the obj a glittering diamond...
[ 277] The Town Jeweler (Given to the jeweler [111][99 Max])
[ 5070] A Small Shaft (Put in another object [3 Max])
[24722] A Grave (Put in another object [2 Max])
From this you can see that the zone with the object (zone 50) intended for 3 diamonds max to be around at one time. (From help maxload: An object in a player's rent file does not count as in the game.)
How does the game handle this? There are 104 max of this object when only 3 were intended. If one player buys 5 from that jeweler and another player takes the one from the chest, what happens next? If this were a quest object, would the quest then be broken? How is it determined which zone gets the object? The zone with the lowest number? Will there actually be 99 max for the jeweler? Okay, this is more than one question.