Hey everyone!
Oh my... seems like I've missed a lot just because I was gone for a few days. I skimmed the last few pages and there are a few things on my mind:
First, the discussion about exploration times.
Actually, this has been on my mind ever since I played the first BrothelSim (the original) - why does nobody consider using a time based system instead of action points? Yes, it would require slightly more code, but I think it is more intuitive and a lot more flexible. Every character (including the player) can have work times (e.g. 8 am to 4 pm for the player, 4 pm to midnight for prostitutes - depending on constitution, etc.) and every action (talking to a girl, having sex, whoring, etc.) takes time to finish.
What do you think about such an approach (general opinions wanted, details can be worked out later)?
Second, about this little note:
- Added decent code to load items from filenames (commented out atm)
Careful with that. The reason why it's reasonable to load tags from filenames is because image tags are unordered sets of the same unnamed data type - so a complex data structure would be wasted on it.
Items however consist of several different, named elements with different data types, so using a more complex data structure (JSON is well suited) is most likely the better choice here.
And yes, binary is faster (it always is if you can come up with a clever format), for both tags and items. However, the primary goal was to reduce storage redundancy, not to make the data unreadable for humans.
Third, the optimization of reading tags from filenames.
I just want to mention that the screenshot looks absolutely awesome to me. So much data at a single glance!
Just from looking at it I assume you have two static identifiers and 260 (26 chars * 10 digits) possible tag combinations that are not ordered alphabetically. How many of these are used right now? And, more importantly, do you have a hashing system in place (that calculates an array index that stores the actual tag from the tuple)? If yes, great! If no, that could speed things up.
Finally, the tagger.
Let me ask this first: Who is mcmanus and where can I find his code? C++ is no big deal and I at least want to give it a look (maybe I can steal his ideas
![Undecided :-\](https://www.pinkpetal.org/Smileys/DarkB/undecided.gif)
).
And to give you a (relatively) clear statement: I can and will code a tagger (and possibly a complete character editor) if you are fine with an external solution that has nothing to do with Python. No deadlines and promises (freelancing ftw).
Have fun!