> Does anyone think it would be a good idea to switch to a > tagged > format, or at least something which makes an external parser easier > to > write? I converted a mud I was working on a while back to tagged world files...taking very little coding, I believe...and converted circle world files to ASCII. A sample: Nm The Meeting Room Of The Gods Desc The meeting room is plain and very simple. A circular table sits in the middle of the room, lit by some unseen light source. There are many chairs around the table, all empty. The Immortal Board Room is to the north. ~ Dir 0 1204 The Immortal Board Room can be seen to the north. Sec 12 Flag d This format does take about 10 or so bytes more per room, but that's relatively little. Also note that the desc is not formatted (ie, no \ns) because the parser formats it to what ever specifications you give it. Also, there is no # field because I eliminated zones and put every room in its own file. It is a little slow at startup, but it pays off in ease of creating rooms and changing them later on. My tags are different from ASCII pfiles in another way... the absense of ':'s This is a better way to do tags, if you want to save space...with ':'s there is an added character for each tag, where just a space is sufficient to end the tag. My tag code also allows less than 4 characters to be used, and thus saves more space by making smaller tag names. A format like this, of course would be much better for an offline editor, as it would probably get all the necessary flags, and could disregard any it did not know. The same with writing...it doesn't need to know the format for the mud...just the tags it uses. In general, a tagged format is almost always better...even if for space reasons you use a single character tag which would take up less space in general than the current format. Blaize -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | 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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