ASCII or Binary? What's best? In my opinion, a little of both. Binary files are nice for storing fixed data that everyone's got to have, ASCII files are nice for storing extended data that not everyone fills up. ex: titles, descriptions, aliases, object strings might be considered 'extended data' Binary allows for speed and easy modifications to the fixed data (such as stats), and the text stuff allows for easy extensibility.. additionally, the data stored in the ASCII file can be redundant with the fixed data, so that if you ever experience any corruption of the binary file, you can simply write a script to rebuild your pfile from the ASCII data. File corruption is a reality and a disadvantage of using binary files; that is, normally you can't recover from it without rolling back (to an old backup). -Mysid -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | FAQ: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html | | Archives: http://post.queensu.ca/listserv/wwwarch/circle.html | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
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