[MUD-Dev] Thief skills, Dream Park and me (again)

[coder at ibm.net]

On 29/11/97 at 10:49 PM, Ling <K.L.Lo-94 at student.lboro.ac.uk> said:

>I just dreamt up a very crude way of representing an irregular
>container so I'm gonna send everyone to sleep with it.  Imagine a forest
>container (or room if you prefer).  It looks like this: 
> 
>    123456789

> 1  X ****			// X = container origin/handle
> 2  ******			// * = Forest
> 3   ********   		// very small and cute forest

>The above would represented as a series of horizontal lines and edges:

>  Line 1: 3 - 6
>  Line 2: 1 - 6
>  Line 3: 2 - 9

>Gedit?  Don't know how it'll cope with something that looks like:

>   ***   ****
>   *********

>Then, still in design stages...  any feedback?
>Something I borrowed from graphics.

An RLE would be cheaper and more space conservative.  The basic concept
is:

  Pick a flag value X.

  Any repeated sequence of a character 'C' is encoded as 'XNC' 
  where '#' is the number of repeats of the character C.

  Any instance of X itself in the data stream is similarly replaced 
  with `X#X`, where the # is the number of X's found, with a single X 
  coming out as 'X1X'.

  Any non-repeated character is encoded as-is.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder at ibm.net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...