Re: Monster damage indicators.

[Scott MacFiggen <>]

>This brings up something I've always wondered...
>
>For the client/server, why is anything being sent as ASCII?  You could
>probably have most standard text strings built in to the client, so you
>only have to tell it to print string number 17017.  If all commands are
>encoded in a 16-bit enum, this means 4 bytes per hit response, regardless
>of the message to be printed.

	This was heavily debated a while back...

>Of course, this means that you need to deal with translating between
>endian formats, but that's not too hard to incorporate into the
>networking code.

	If you used network byte order it wouldn't be a problem in
my opinion but alot of people thought it would be a problem as I
recall.

>If we are serious about playing over low bandwidths, ASCII needs to go.

	I tend to agree with you but not everyone shares this opinion.
I believe the idea was to try a client/server with an ascii based protocol
and if it didn't work well enough, switch to a binary interface.

>--PC

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+                         Scott MacFiggen                                    +
+                            88 VTR250                                       +
+      TCS Systems Administrator  (Po / Danube / Parker / Pasteur / Ara)     +
+                          CSUA Vice-President                               +
+                          +
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+