Re: game design

From: "duergar" <duergar@inyourdreams.clix.pt>

Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 00:00:00 +0000

> For now, I am happy trying to figure out how my game will work on a
> conceptual basis. The question that has me puzzled right now is this:
> how can I download messages from Outlook and place them into a specific
> folder? Can anyone recommend a utility that does this? Also, when I

My humble suggestion: forget about using outlook for this. Get a new POP
account that you will use exlusively for the orders, so that you don't end
up losing important personal mails in case your program fails somehow. (you
can get free pop accounts from several places these days). Then you can code
a small utility to login to that account and download the email. I'm sure
you can find c libraries for this somewhere, but I've never used them. I've
already made this sort of thing with Delphi and it was really simple, even
considering that my programming skills are rather low. You could either
insert a getMail routine in the game itself or make a dedicated program to
get the mail and save it to text files in the choosen format.

> The advantage of the master list is that I can easily scan through the
> list and pick out orders based upon priority (for example, battles
> orders come before move orders), and once I am through the list, I can
> scan it again and again. Conceptually, it seems easier to process
> orders in this manner rather than scanning many different files.

As someone suggested, read the orders into the memory in order to minimize
disk I/O. The structure to use depends on how your game will work,
what parsing algorythms it'll use and so on. It's hard to give you advice
without knowing further details.

Hope this helps, if you need more tips feel free to ask.

Regards,
Pedro
duergar@inyourdreams.clix.pt
remove 'in your dreams' to reply by email.

References

game design
grenadeboy@yahoo.com
Wed, 09 Aug 2000 00:00:00 +0000