On Tue, 14 Apr 1998, John Evans wrote:
>On Tue, 14 Apr 1998, claywar wrote:
>
>> George wrote:
>> > Type the room/world/mob/object/zones in exactly as they appear in
>> > the files on disk, with online parsing to let you know if something is
>> > wrong.
>> That all depends on how "pretty" the world file format is. =) I admit on
>> Morgaelin that this wouldn't be a very pleasurable experience due to all
>> of the additions made which probably could have been done a lot neater.
>> Now for a tagged format it wouldn't be as bad.
>I think that I would have to agree with this. Tagged datafiles would be
>much easier because they are "human readable", whereas datafiles like
>what I use are not human readable because they are nothing more than a
>string of numbers sperated by spaces. These numbers mean nothing to
>someone reading the files, but means tons to the program that is reading
>them in and parsing the data.
The idea here is to appeal to people who like to write the files offline
and despise an OLC system. These people would have complete control over
what the system offers instead of being limited by the Obuild/OasisOLC
menus to be written for some feature.
But of course, you'd have to tell people what the file format was. Mainly
it would be limited use, if only by the implementors, but could be handy to
test out features before you actually write the Obuild/Oasis interface.
The consideration that many people have awful looking formats would apply.
I think this would make a great OLC system for stock CircleMUD. It's easy
to implement (about the same as writing a note), gives the utmost in
flexibility (though at the expense of readability), and can easily be
ripped out by anyone who doesn't like it. :)
Since we already have command line and menuing OLC systems, why put a
fancy one in the current stock code? At least this would be usable, and
minimal.
This reasoning neatly avoids the fact I'll have to completely rewrite db.c
to do it, but hey, there's many other things I have in mind to do with the
rewrite anyway. Can you say 'non-prototyped mobiles?' In addition, how many
other CircleMUD's will boot (and be able to log in) after a
'rm -rf lib/world'? You will...
Remember, nothing this radical goes into 3.0.
--
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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