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.

>>28
A screenful is far fewer than that unless you're making the weirdest fucking game ever. A good chunk of the level is going to be walls and stuff, and plenty of empty space too. Even if you're trying to make the most crowded game ever, I'd be shocked if you really needed to worry about more than 100 monsters at once, and I doubt all of those would be visible at the same time.

Maybe if the screen is much larger than 80x24.