I’m posting about this because I like talking about code and nobody is on IRC. If you don’t like code, you may want to skip this. Also, none of this is rocket science, but it was a nice exercise.

Traditionally, the data files in Eressea have been text files. You know the kind where you’re doing a lot of fprintf and fscanf everywhere in the code. There are usually two advantages associated with that: small integers take up less space (2-3 bytes instead of 4), and when something goes terribly wrong, you can edit the data with vi.

The latter had long been a mixed blessing, with edits occasionally doing more harm than good, and since the introduction of a shell and script access to all the game data, it’s not really been necessary. Which left three reasons not to switch: Slight space improvements, the amount of work to change over to something else, and backward compatibility. However, I had some time on my hands recently and decided to tackle all of those issues.
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