Basternae.org

The socials file, a text file containing 127 KB of text for the social actions in the MUD, has been converted to the new XML format. The help entry file is next.

Class files have been converted to XML.  It was a lot less work than the race files.

I spent quite a lot of time manually converting the race files to XML.  The file format didn’t lend itself well to automatic conversion, nor was much of it an easy search-and-replace setup.  Some of the values were strings of flags, some integers, some full sentences, without much consistency.

It wasn’t fast and it wasn’t easy, but the race files are now loading in the new Basternae.

Converting area files should be a lot easier since they have a more consistent format, but we have a lot to convert before we get to that point — class files, for instance, which will be very similar to race files.

It’s done - objects save and load as XML data rather than some ad-hoc text format.  I’m sure there will be a few extra details to work out, but the saving and loading of basic objects works now.  The change cleared up a bug or two that would come up once in a while due to formatting inconsistencies.

I still have to fix the violence update problem that I mentioned on the 1st.  I’ve tried a few minor changes in the hope that the problem would be resolved, but it really does look like a full combat-process rewrite is in order.  The original method is fundamentally flawed, so we need to work out a better way.

I’ve started tackling the conversion of all object saving to XML. Player saving was easy, since players tend to be pretty much the same and have all the same data fields. However, with all the different types of objects, nesting, affects, extra descriptions, etc. objects are a bit more of a project to convert. Objects are also saved in more than one type of file — corpse data file, player files, storage chests, etc.

So far I have them saving to XML the way I want them to. The next step is loading, which will take a good solid afternoon or evening of codework.

I’ve been mulling over the idea of moving data files over to an SQL database rather than XML, since XML is DREADFULLY SLOW. It’s not dreadfully slow on this fast machine, nor will it be on any server that I use, but it could become an issue at some point.

SQL would be a good thing and a bad thing. I’d get the automatic field matching and data integrity at the expense of greater complexity. Although there are tools to edit SQL databases directly, it’s not as easy as editing a text file if I needed to change a value in a file. Backups would also be a bit more complicated.

One thing at a time — I need to finish this first.

Traditionally MUDs I’ve seen have used raw text files for player files. Some might use binary, and some might compress them into a gzipped format.

There’s a problem with using this sort of file: in general, they are written or read a single line at at time. In Basternae 2 we had a significant problem with player file corruption. If the save or load engine had a problem with one of the values found in the file, you were pretty much screwed. If this happened during a file save, you pretty much had to restore the player file from a backup and hope that the backup was recent.

In order to banish this problem to the realms of oblivion, I’m incorporating the XML-based file save/load code that I used on my AlgoRhythmia 3 application. The difference with this code is that instead of opening the file and writing it line by line, dealing with values as they come, instead it creates an XML data store in memory and populates that with the values, and then serializes it to disk after all the values are checked.

So, intstead of having a half-written player file if the values are bad, it’ll be an all-or-nothing. If the data store fails to build, the file won’t be written, so instead of losing up to a week worth of play data, at most about 15 minutes would be lost, and that assumes the player hadn’t picked up or dropped any items in that time.

Once I have this code done I may give serious thought to setting up all of the game files to use XML. In addition to the build-then-save, XML also some built in checks and guards, so a typo in a hand-edited file would be much less likely to destroy the universe.

The downside: XML files are larger and slower.

The other upside: Data files written in XML can be easily processed by other applications, such as a web script that posts dynamic game stats on a page.