To edit spells or not to edit spells....
 

I'm currently working on the next version of my spell editor, mainly on the new combat abilities. In a month or so these may be part of the emu, so it's good to start early :)

I'm also implementing a string editor for the eqstr_us.txt. This files contains almost all strings of EQ, including racial names, starting cities, spell descriptions (right-click on spell in-game) and combat ability descriptions. This will allow the user to conveniently create new spells and combat abilities (with those probably being more important since almost all possible spells are already included with the client).

However, I'm running into a few problems here. Both files are client side and need to be updated via a website (with the possibility of this being warez, but I'm not sure about that). A synchronisation process needs to be implemented to maintain stability.

The client doesn't do that for us.
The server isn't able to do that.

My editor is probably the least desired 3rd party tool, because of the reasons mentioned above.

Any suggestions?

I'd say if they're compact enough, we can deliever them with the binary packages like we do for some other utilities.

As for the end products, it would be up to the servers owners to make the files available on a website. If you ask me, its no different from having to download hakpacks for NWN to play on a specific server, owners would have to just put that information in their MOTD on their servers...

Something like 4 mb uncompressed?

Yeah, guess you're right. I can't host a public server, so this isn't my problem anyway, heh. Just wanted to mention it.

I'll crawl back into my cave then and work on that editor :shock:

4mb? wtf you writing it in? VB? thats huge.

4 mb, huge? mp3s take up more space!

Gah, I meant the two text files (spells and eqstr). I thought Trump meant those with "including them", but now that I think about it, that wouldn't make much sense.

The spell editor is 2.5 mb in size, mainly because of the icon/gem bmps. Jpegs never seem to work correctly and I don't have a free gif lib for Delphi.
Oh, yeah, and it's that large because I'm using Delphi. Delphi sucks if you want to write small apps, hehe.

Next thing will probably in C#. Much smaller, but I just started to learn C# and I'm a looooong time Delphi user.

ya thats great and all but eqemu != an mp3

4mb added to our existing distro zip is alot imo. look at most of our past releases, they are small...also Sourceforge only gives us so much space to store stuff...so space is an issue.

I'm now using indexed, RLE compressed bmps making the exe 1.5 mb in size. For some weird reason they don't always work however. Sometimes Delphi shows me the finger and thinks those bmps "are invalid". *shrug*

The executable itself never seems to have this problem, so I'll stick with the smaller bmps now.

By the way, compressed the exe is only 770 kb, so it's not that of a big deal.

770 isnt to bad, thats on par with the size of the zone executable.

hey if you edit spells do you have to provide new spells_en or us to people who play?