| version 1.5 | | version 1.6 |
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| 8. How to Add new values | | 8. How to Add new values |
| | | |
| | | 9. Programming notes |
| | | |
| ******************************************************************************* | | ******************************************************************************* |
| 1. HOW TO CREATE NEW ARCHETYPES AND BITMAPS: | | 1. HOW TO CREATE NEW ARCHETYPES AND BITMAPS: |
| ******************************************************************************** | | ******************************************************************************** |
| | |
| flag values. | | flag values. |
| | | |
| 7) As appropriate, update the arch files and rebuild. | | 7) As appropriate, update the arch files and rebuild. |
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| | | |
| | | ******************************************************************************* |
| | | 9. PROGRAMMING NOTES |
| | | ******************************************************************************** |
| | | |
| | | This section provides some specific programming notes about objects. If |
| | | you don't actually work with the C code, there is no need to read this section. |
| | | |
| | | Basically, all the char* pointers in the object structure use a shared |
| | | string library. Using shared strings saves memory and improved performance. |
| | | |
| | | To use the share string library, it is as simple as calling add_string(char |
| | | *cp), where *cp is the pointer to the string you want to add. You can pass |
| | | defined strings also. The function the finds the string, if it exists, |
| | | increases the referecne count, and returns a pointer to the existing string. |
| | | If the string does not exist in the table, it allocates space for it, copies |
| | | the data into the space, and returns that new pointer. |
| | | |
| | | free_string should be called to free these strings. |
| | | |
| | | strdup and free should never be used on these shared strings. |
| | | |
| | | When copying objects, the copy_object routine should always be used. It will |
| | | add reference counts to the copied strings. |
| | | |
| | | Because shared strings will return a pointer to a string if it |
| | | exists, one can see if the strings are equal by comparing the shared |
| | | string address they point to. |
| | | |
| | | Shared string data should never be modified by any means - eg, |
| | | strcpy(op->name, "new value") will update all the objects that use the same |
| | | shared string as op does for its name. Even without shared strings, this |
| | | should never be done, because you can not be sure of the space allocation for |
| | | op->name is long enough. |