Re: Monster damage indicators.

[Preston.F.Crow@Dartmouth.EDU (Preston F. Crow)]

> The other problem I se with adding those indicators has to deal with
>new client/server.  Printing those out will probably flood the link
>even worse than what happens right now (plan for the present attacks
>is to buffer them up, and print them out in bunches (ie, 15 times you
>hit beholder hard).

This brings up something I've always wondered...

For the client/server, why is anything being sent as ASCII?  You could
probably have most standard text strings built in to the client, so you
only have to tell it to print string number 17017.  If all commands are
encoded in a 16-bit enum, this means 4 bytes per hit response, regardless
of the message to be printed.

Of course, this means that you need to deal with translating between
endian formats, but that's not too hard to incorporate into the
networking code.

If we are serious about playing over low bandwidths, ASCII needs to go.

--PC