Re: New MOB file format and other idea(s)

From: George (greerga@CIRCLEMUD.ORG)
Date: 04/29/98


On Tue, 28 Apr 1998, Chris Jacobson wrote:

[Format snipped.]

The BIND nameserver 8.1.1 does that for its configuration files.
ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind/src/8.1.1/bind-src.tar.gz

>I know I could eliminate = and ; by using a minimum-1-white-space rule,
>and its also something I'm considering.

Then you lose the C-style ultracompaction possibilities, no International
Chris Jacobson Obfuscated Mob File Contest.

>Plan also involves actually parsing \r\n's in descriptions into a special
>escape-character, so there would be no need to worry about \n's when
>reading in the description.  The parser would actually look for \ escape
>sequences in the string being read and replace them with appropriate
>character(s), thus:

You could also implement auto-wordwap this way.

>On a simliar topic, I've also been debating about going back to flat-data
>style mobfiles.  As the MUD expands, more time would be spent
>parsing/saving, and the overall effect would be detrimental speedwise - a
>key-data style database is far slower than a flat-data style database, but
>an object-oriented/container style database is several magnitudes slower
>than that!

You don't plan to crash much do you? Then I wouldn't worry a lot,
especially if you have copyover.

>Having a 4000 room area (yes, thats a single worldfile - 1.8 megs!), that
>is just "repetetive" data, takes a long time to read in, so I'm
>considering taking the code I used to generate the worldfile itself, and
>changing it to build the zone at runtime (its basically a 20x20x10 grid of
>space that wraps completely, with room name being the [##-##-##])

A 'world pre-processor' of sorts?  That adds some complexities but allows
you to rip out all of the world processing from the MUD and replace
'Loading world' with some fread's and str_dup's.

>Anyone else used a run-time/boot-time generator for rooms, perhaps for a
>gridded forest or large amount of land?

No, but I'm going to start doing it for my web page.  That way I can have
the page generated when people hit, allowing customization.  My current
Bash shell scripts work just fine but are way too slow for that.

--
George Greer  -  Me@Null.net   | Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity
http://www.van.ml.org/~greerga | is not thus handicapped. -- Elbert Hubbard


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