In the old days of MUDs it became a rather common occurrence to use each bit of a 32-bit integer as a binary flag to set or unset a value. This was far more efficient than using an array of 32 boolean values because the integer consumed 4 bytes, while an array of 32 booleans consumed anywhere from 32 to 128 bytes, depending on the system architecture.

This helped to save a great deal of storage space and memory, which was incredibly important given the machines of 1991 or so: a 33MHz 80486 processor with 16 megabytes of RAM was pretty typical.

Even with systems a lot cheaper and a lot faster now, the amount of RAM and processor time you use is still a pretty big determinant of the type of hosting plan you will need to purchase. Saving RAM is still a good idea.

Take, for instance, the “system flags”. It’s a group of flags that control certain things about the game, such as whether equipment wears out in combat and whether mobs are limited in the number of spells they can cast in battle. Stored in the new XML format as an integer, a typical value is:

<_actFlags>8256</_actFlags>

That’s not very descriptive.

We can make it a little more descriptive by using an enum tagged with the FlagsAttribute. Here’s how we implement it:

[Flags]
public enum MudFlags
{
none = 0,
turbolevel = 1,
equipmentdamage = 2,
mobcastslots = 4,
mobslootplayers = 8,
autoprice = 16,
walkableocean = 32,
nameapproval = 64
}

In our system data class we have a variable that is a MudFlags type.

As with an enumerated value, this type uses the flag names for serialization and deserialization. Now we can see what things are turned on with a quick glance at the system data file:

<_actFlags>equipmentdamage autoprice</_actFlags>

So, equipment damage and automatic pricing is turned on.

This is also handy for displaying what flags are set — we can just use the ToString() method of the MudFlags type to get more info.