First let my discribe our OLC system (diamond) I hope it helps. We have a menu based OLC or our mud. Instead of going though all menu's you can also go directly to the state you want by typing something like: olc create mobile 2020 (create is optional and mobile can be mob). After this you go through sequential steps for creating a mobile. If you type ? you get extra help and # gets you to a menu to shortcut the steps. It doesn't use a con state for every step but instead it uses only Con_building and 2 extra sets of states (Prog_xxxxx, and Step_xxxx) When you are building you are not in the game (you don't hear gossip, tells, etc.) but you can get in and out the OLC system so fast that I don't think this is a problem. This is what I think what the advantages and disadvantages are for using binary format world files instead of the ordinary ascii format: - Binary files aren't portable, different machines can have different sizes for integers and such, even the byte order inside the integers can differ. - Binary files aren't easyer to deal with, when you make some addition to a saved data structure you'll have to make a utility program to convert the binary files. Ascii files can often be changed while keeping backward compatibility. compatibility. - Binary files can make the bootup a lot faster though. Especialy if you leave out the sanity checks (do them at create or save time). - I don't know what proprietary means (I'm dutch) but you can make it pretty hard for other muds to use your world files while still being able to load the standard world files when you use ascii files. (make additions to every room, object, etc.) - Binary files can be edited by a normal editor. So my advice on this is: don't do it (yet). Jaco
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