C memory management

Hey /prog, I'm teaching myself C by writing a roguelike and I noticed that C uses manual memory management for creating objects in the heap. I was wondering if the C-gods could lend me some advice on how to proceed with this:

I want to write a roguelike with thousands of NPCs, every NPC is a really small piece of data which does not contain any pointers (position, stats, behavior... probably ends up being a few bytes). NPCs would spawn and die constantly. How would I go about managing the memory for this?

• malloc and free individual NPCs
• Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector
• malloc a big chunk of memory and build some kind of memory manager on top of it (are there techniques for this?)

Please advice.

>>12
How many times do I have to declaim that code? I did it in the first post I made which should make it clear. You can blather on all you like about "doing it properly" -- you didn't explain what that might be until after the fact, yet >>1 is explicitly asking for guidance in that area. Without more help than you've given he's likely to produce something buggy, unclear and downright wrong. Meanwhile, you're actually advocating using C++isms in C. That's what earned you the Linus remark.

As for me, in fact I've been employed as a programmer for more than 10 years now. I am paid well and I often earn compliments from my employer and coworkers regarding the quality of the code I write. So you can say what you like but it won't affect my self-image.