Heyo,
You'll probably find an answer to this in the archives, but here's my
impression: The flatfile format that you're reading is just that. A
flatfile dump of a database. It's not intended to be human-readable or
organized in any particular way.
There's a utility somewhere that splits a flatfile into its component
objects, but I would imagine that's only marginally better for
readability. You'd usually cat all the pieces back together to
make the textdump for compilation by coldcc.
Best way to understand the source code is from inside the game, though.
The programmer tools are there to let you explore and edit the source code
from the running game, and the help files are somewhat helpful as well.
To be completely honest, though, I never really figured out ColdCore, and
I'm not sure it's worth trying. It's suffered from a rather remarkable
amount of feature bloat over the years. It's really not a good core to
start out on, especially if you're thinking of writing your own.
There are a few other cores out there, check the FTP repository at
cold.org. Also see http://cold.xidus.net/ for an old copy of an
in-progress core, as well as a minimal core demonstrating basic
networking.
Once you get a feel for it, I'd suggest just starting your own, referring
to other cores when necessary. Plan to rewrite the basics a couple times
until you have a good handle on the best way to do things. The minimum
necessary for things to start to be interesting is an in-game eval
statement and some kind of method-editing setup (tf and emacs works
nicely, see 'localedit.tfrc' in the XidusCore tarball). Then you can stop
the shutdown-and-recompile cycle. If I ever get bored, I'll release
another framework-style core with editing and basic coding/code exploring
tools.
Hope this helps a little... I'd suggest going all the way through the
archives before asking too many more questions, though. :)
Jeremy Weatherford
xidus@xidus.net
http://xidus.net
On Thu, 23 Aug 2001, Steve Mosher wrote:
> Ahh, rock on, and thanks. Now my slew of questions (coming soon!) will be
> less redundant.
>
> In the meantime, I've got one question that I don't think has been asked:
>
> Why is coldcore, nearly 50K lines of code, all in one source file? Is it
> simply that coldcc has no #include directive? If so, couldn't that be easily
> fixed?
>
> I've been trying to deduce a lot of the workings of ColdCore by looking at
> the source, but 2 megs of source is difficult (to say the least) to wade
> through.
>
> I have a perl script kicking around somewhere that can be used as a
> preprocessor to implement #include (as it works in C, effectively), IIRC, I
> did build some decent recursion handling into it. I can provide a copy of it
> if you think it would be useful.
>
> Ciao
>
> On Thursday 23 August 2001 11:38, Jeremy Weatherford wrote:
> > Heyo,
> >
> > The almost-completely-current (including your message but not mine,
> > strangely) archives are at http://xidus.xidus.net/coldstuff.tgz (195k) in
> > HTML format. Untarball it and point your browser to
> > coldstuff/msg00000.html in the and most of the links work surprisingly
> > well (excepting the thread and date indices)
> >
> > Brought to you by /bin/bash and wget.
> >
> > Jeremy Weatherford
> > xidus@xidus.net
> > http://xidus.net
> >
> > On Thu, 23 Aug 2001, Steve Mosher wrote:
> > > I'm currently working on a MUD (of sorts) using ColdCore and Genesis, and
> > > I've got a lot of really stupid questions, most of which I imagine have
> > > been answered already on some of these lists.
> > >
> > > However, reading through all of the messages via web is a real pain, so I
> > > was wondering: could I possibly get a tarball or something of all the
> > > list archives? Plaintext is preferable, though I can live with HTML.
> > >
> > > --
> > > Steve Mosher,
> > > Mad Scientist
>
> --
> Steve Mosher,
> Mad Scientist
>
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