Shannon V. OKeets
Posts: 22095
Joined: 5/19/2005 From: Honolulu, Hawaii Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: amwild quote:
ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets quote:
ORIGINAL: doctormm Steve - You mentioned that the program uses some port/city names internally. Will there be any way for someone who is editing the name file to know that a city name is "reserved"? Why not just use a unique key internally, instead of the editable name? The reserved names comes from the fact I am working with the code I inherited from CWIF. What you are asking for falls into the category of making a WIF game design kit, which is not part of my project task list. Where things fall out with little or no additional effort on my part, I will make them available to the players to modify. I have no philosophical difficulty with that. But I do not really need an expanded scope of work. As a database programmer, I prefer to use numeric keys to refer to records, since numeric-data keys take less memory, are much faster for a PC to handle, and are not typically broken by changing related text in the record, though I do understand that text-data keys are more informative when writing code. Perhaps, if you didn't want to change your key data from text to numeric, you could keep your text-datatype key and add a separate city/port name field that is identical to the key field (at least to start with), but changing the city/port name wouldn't break the key reference. I hope I don't sound too much like I'm trying to tell you how to do your job... There are several solutions. The easiest would be to leave the code as is and add a supplemental translations file that the players could edit. To start with, all the translations would be Berlin = Berlin, London = London, and so on. if the player wanted to change a reserved name, then he would have to change the second name in this file - besides changing the one in the map labels file. Like this one, many of the tasks for transforming MWIF into a WIF design kit would be fairly simple, I just have other fish to fry.
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Steve Perfection is an elusive goal.
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