Re: Question about Reply Command

From: Jeremy Elson (jelson@blaze.cs.jhu.edu)
Date: 04/20/95


>   With some of the work I've been doing lately, it has brought me to look 
> at the whole idnum thing for players, and I happened to go over the reply 
> command.  I guess my question is this, would using a pointer to char_data 
> take up any more memory than the long-int used?  The problem with the 
> reply, though this may not be considered a problem for some, is that all 
> mobs have idnums of 0.  Therefore, you can not reply to a mob, though it 
> can freely reply to you because when you tell someone something, it 
> stores your idnum in a var in their struct.  So, would anyone see a 
> problem with turning it into a pointer to the char_data struct or would 
> anyone have a better way of working this so that mobs would be included?  
> It also seems it might save a bit of time being that the reply command 
> searches through the player list to get a pointer to the last person who 
> told.  Comments, replies, solutions, all appreciated.

Early versions of Circle 3.0 actually did use a char_data pointer instead
of the idnum.  I switched it over to idnums a few patchlevels ago for
various reasons, including the fact that the pointer you keep to the
person you're trying to reply to may not be valid later; i.e., if the
person logs out.

--Jeremy



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