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Re: Monster damage indicators.





Preston F. Crow wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 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 we are serious about playing over low bandwidths, ASCII needs to go.

We had a big long argument about this when we first started discussing
the client/server protocol. Basically the advantage of ASCII is that it 
is human readable and hence easier to debug. However there is nothing to
stop us from switching to or supporting a binary protocol later when the
protocol is fully implemented and tested.

 Those of us who want to be able to play over modem lines are just going 
to have to wait until the client/server split is finished before work 
starts on optimizing the protocol.

--
Rupert G. Goldie, Research Scientist                rgg@aaii.oz.au
Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute        
/\/\|| Level 6, 171 Latrobe Street, Melbourne, Australia