On Tue, 25 Jul 1995, Daniel [Trice] Koepke wrote: > The problem here is that Merc writes the players file out when > they save. If you have a lot of stuff in there, and say 30-50 players, > and just a small precentage of them type save, plus the occassional > autosave, you can get some lag. True, this method is inefficient and induces lag, but throw 8 meg ram into a vesa cache controller (like I've got) and disk access lag is a thing of the past ;) And there's no reason this method couldn't be hacked to work with binary pfiles. Put a sh_int tag before each entry and you could have the same system. Add a header to the pfile to identify it as a tagged pfile, then if the character loader doesn't see the header tag, it loads in the normal way (but the character saver saves tagged files, effectively converting on the fly). > Another problem being that Ron was wrong. DIKUs (and all of it's > clones from what I've seen) use a method: > > int act; > > In the char_data structure, and then bits (PLR/PRF in circle). > New plr/prf bits simply need code to implement the toggling of them which > is simple in Circle. In the full release of NiM3 [nimud/theisles, merc > derived] is probably easier than in any other Diku-based system. It's > handled like this: <code snipped> Got a chance to look at an Isles setup. You've got some great ideas in there. > > > Setting default values is easily accomplished. Initialize them just > > before the pfile is loaded. Then old pfiles are converted to new pfiles > > the next time the user connects. > > Unfortunately, that's wrong. It doesn't automatically update the > pfiles in all cases. The problem is consider this line: > > HitMove 24 24 89 89 > > Now you added two more parameters to that, but didn't update > everyone's pfiles. Instant crash-ola for 99% of the Merc-based MUDs > when someone tries to login. :^) Well obviously you can't change a line like that withough putting appropriate parsing code in with it. I don't have the code handy but if you increase the number of arguments it looks for to 6, and set any null values to your default values, it should be able to handle the conversion during loading without a hitch. Sam
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