On Mon, 24 Apr 1995, Jeremy Elson wrote: > Before anyone gets too deeply into discussion of how to convert playerfiles, > for use with other UNIX systems, I may as well bring up an idea I've been > thinking seriously about for the past couple of weeks: switching Circle > over to using ASCII-based playerfiles. > Why? Well, first, I'll tell you the reason I've wanted to stick with binary > files in the past: > -They take up less space (1K per player vs. 4K per player, or whatever the > min blocksize of your filesystem is.) I found that less than 25% of players > have rentfiles in practice, so a binary file saved space. I also think that most people have enough HD space, so that this doesn't pose much of a problem. > all data there. On a similar, related note, the Mail and Board systems > will probably also switch over to being ASCII-based -- simple text files > always win over unreadable binary files. > Comments are welcome. I haven't come to a firm decision on this yet, and > although I'm heavily inclined to make the switch, I'd be willing to stay > with binary if there's serious opposition. I would very much like to see this come true. The speed wouldn't make much of a difference on most systems. The plusses is in my eyes easily out-weightes(sp?) the minuses.. :) Maybe even put in a option to save it in binary? (Tho might be a lot of unessecary code) I also saw a post about compressing pfiles with gzip/compress, and I've though about this before, but I think it would slow down things a lot. So I've decided not to put it in, but it might be nice as a option tho. *************************************************************************** * Ole Gjerde | Computer Science major * * aka Kilkenny | at North Dakota * * | State University * * Email: Gjerde@plains.NoDak.edu |-------------------------* * Gjerde@badlands.NoDak.edu | Proud user of Linux * ***************************************************************************
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