On Tuesday, June 18, 2002, at 12:57 AM, George Greer wrote: >> And finaly cutting back on the files that are there, IMOTD MOTD, why >> can't these be called from help.hlp or something? > > Easier to modify just one file than root around in a big one. > well I have done a conversion of the help system to individual files stored like ascii player files with a main index that specifies the keywords and the file to look for the entry in. The system also has a online editor and contains a system that templates the help files to provide a consistent layout that can be changed on the fly as to how it looks but not the order in which it prints the various fields of the entry, though you can just rewrite the code to build the entry. Might be worth incorporating into the code as it would cut down on the help file size and if one of the entries gets corrupted then the whole help system isn't shutdown because the system couldn't load an entry, though if the index goes bad you'll have to rebuild it. The system does not load any help entries when the mud boots but brings them online as needed and flushes unused entries after a period of time which if i remember right was changeable through the config file. Yes I'm sure some of you have thought of improvements as you have read this i know i did and some changes that could be done. The code would need to be changed some unless people would like XML based help files but it's not a major change really the routines that handle the XML parsing use expat with the files for it directly compiled into the mud rather than as a library, and it would be easy to change from XML format. Anyways the help file could always be split down into individual files if we wanted to. Ron -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | FAQ: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html | | Archives: http://post.queensu.ca/listserv/wwwarch/circle.html | | Newbie List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/circle-newbies/ | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
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