I use Bison and Flex in my current mud engine which is still one of the few commercial ones left. I find it is too much work keeping up the grammar though and I am slowly converting to an xml / mysql based file system. Right now I have a full compiler that compiles the zone files and proprietary functional language into a binary structure and a parser that reads the player files but over the years I have come to find that it would be much easier as a relational database that would allow much quicker look up with less memory use. I am not saying bison and flex is not a good choice if you really want to get down and dirty but I am saying if your thinking of running your game server on multi platforms like Windows and Linux it is easier to have something like a relational database underneath than porting the file system stuff over each operating system. Now with that said if you must build everything from ground up I would really look into Boost and the serialization library over writing a parser with Bison and flex there are limitations to the type of parser you will get out of bison but you won't find those till much later in your development. A game like a mud is well fitted to a relational database and an xml interface. You could easily use xml to both interface with the players and to create web page interfaces with the game like clan pages that could list who was on and clan standings or quest hints and help pages. Again you could do this by creating your own file systems but you are then reinventing a lot of code that has been done for you if you were to use something like c++ bindings, mysql and php, python, or pearl as the mud languages for scripting.. I can tell you when changes have been made to the g++ compiler over the years I have spent more time fixing my bison grammar and c++ problems with the file systems then I have actually adding to the game. You want to make the base code easy enough to upkeep that you will have time to add features to the game for your users. I just don't want to see you get to where I am and have to re-engineer your game server while your players wait for those features they have been asking for. Ken -----Original Message----- From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bill Cox Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2009 12:49 PM To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: game development question:reading and writing game data to and from files In general, for complex databases, I prefer to write custom reader/writers using bison/flex. An ASCII file that mirrors your classes well has many advantages. You can edit it easily, and it's fairly simple to maintain backwards compatibility with previous versions. Bill On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Tyler Littlefield<tyler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > hmm, so I would store the pointer to an int/string/double. > I need to be able to tell what it is though, no? > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sina Bahram" <sbahram@xxxxxxxxx> > To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2009 10:36 AM > Subject: RE: game development question:reading and writing game data to and > from files > > >> The map definitely handles this bro. >> >> Just don't make it a map of primative to primative, make it a map of >> primative to object. That object can be of any type you like. >> >> Take care, >> Sina >> >> ________________________________ >> >> From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx >> [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tyler >> Littlefield >> Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2009 12:18 PM >> To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx >> Subject: game development question:reading and writing game data to and >> from >> files >> >> >> Hello all, >> I've started work on a custom mud, and am trying to figure something out. >> Each player will have a set of keys that will be stored, name, connect >> time, >> creation time, etc. >> I was thinking of storing these in a map, but that requires that the map >> hold multiple values; something which the c++ map doesn't do. >> So, I'm trying to figure something out. >> I'd like to be able to store player data, and a list of the player's >> inventory so the objects can be recreated when the player connects >> somehow. >> I would need to store object type, name, etc etc. >> I'm not quite sure how I could achieve this easily; I could possibly >> itterate through the map once I've gotten the data type thing figured out >> and do something like write key=value. >> Then when I loaded it I could just strtok on the = and set that up, but >> I'm >> not quite sure how I'd handle inventory and that. >> This is the only snag I'm having so far, and I'm not able to move on >> without >> it, as I'm to the point where I need to start saving player data, so help >> would be really appriciated at this point. :) >> Thanks, >> >> __________ >> View the list's information and change your settings at >> //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind >> > > __________ > View the list's information and change your settings at > //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind > > __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind