Re: Currency System Revisited

From: Daniel A. Koepke (dkoepke@circlemud.org)
Date: 10/06/02


On Sun, 6 Oct 2002, Drathus wrote:

> The README has more information than I'm going to post here.

From it,

  Additionally there's a linked list added to the pfile strucutre (BIG
  NOTE here for those who want to take a look at this who don't have a
  different pfile format (ASCII, XML, SQL, etc.)  This could corrupt
  your pfile and require a pwipe.)

I'm afraid it's worse than that.  You can't have variable-sized player
records in CircleMUD's binary pfile system, which would result from
storing such a data structure.  Since player records are all the same
size, loading a player is a simple matter of seek to the beginning of his
location in the pfile, read a char_file_u-sized chunk of binary data, and
copy it into a char_data structure.

That leaves either switching to a more flexible system, introducing an
upperbound on the number of different currencies and using an array, or
using a separate file for this type of information (as has been done with
rent records, aliases, etc.).

It should probably be one of our highest post-3.1 priorities to introduce
a more flexible, general format for player data either in addition to, as
an alternative to, or as a replacement for the binary pfile system.

-dak

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