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Re: Monster damage indicators.



 Actually, the way the present implementation is going, it is binary
based.

 The problem with having the client have embedded strings, howerver, is this:

1) Any time a new string is added, a new client is needed (with this
updated string).  To add support to know what all strings a client knows
gets to be pretty messy.

2) Even for the attack strings, the total string is not constant - the
monster name varies.  So you are probably still talking about 15 bytes
or so for any hit message (about 10 for the monster name, and 4 more
for the string ID).

3) The actual TCP header is a fair number of bytes in itself, so reducing
the hit message from 25 to 15 bytes may not be nearly as important as
reducing the number of packets to send (which message buffereing will do).

 But back to the original ASCII/binary protocol debate, you also have to
consider that if you have a slow link, it is almost certainly going to
be compressed.  So while the actual amount of data that is being 
transmitted might vary considerably, at the compression stage, the amount
of data for either ascii or binary will be pretty close to the same.

 --Mark