I’ve started tackling the conversion of all object saving to XML. Player saving was easy, since players tend to be pretty much the same and have all the same data fields. However, with all the different types of objects, nesting, affects, extra descriptions, etc. objects are a bit more of a project to convert. Objects are also saved in more than one type of file — corpse data file, player files, storage chests, etc.

So far I have them saving to XML the way I want them to. The next step is loading, which will take a good solid afternoon or evening of codework.

I’ve been mulling over the idea of moving data files over to an SQL database rather than XML, since XML is DREADFULLY SLOW. It’s not dreadfully slow on this fast machine, nor will it be on any server that I use, but it could become an issue at some point.

SQL would be a good thing and a bad thing. I’d get the automatic field matching and data integrity at the expense of greater complexity. Although there are tools to edit SQL databases directly, it’s not as easy as editing a text file if I needed to change a value in a file. Backups would also be a bit more complicated.

One thing at a time — I need to finish this first.