Post: #68

Oh I understand that and it really depends. This comes back to an old argument of what else might be calling for those values. Though I don't plan on changing any hardcode to change this behavior in old code... it could happen (unlikely). Plus, when my pc is running (HDD is locked up from chkdsk and might be a bad windows file; ie I have to buy a new HDD to back mine up too and reformat) I am going to see how much code is being processed checking a MORE value and what it takes to store it. A tag is literally a byte per alphanumeric character you use. This can be really low in resource use.

Like I made a statement about vendors and like 500 of each item (even 50 is a lot). I can use one tag with 3 arguments in it. ItemID, Value, and Amount... and just that one line freed up 500 items. That is a lot of free memory and way less items. So even if you attached 50 tags to every player.. it still is not going to be as harsh on your server as 500 items in a vendor box for each item on a vendor.... on every vendor.

I would still use things like more and blank placeholders as such if you want. It might be easier just to remember a tag though when scripting without using a reference. I think that is more personal use. As I said, more could change in the hardcode one day... but most likely not. Again, preference.

If that does end up happening (using those empty slots for something else) I would give the community a weeks prior notice to get ready for it. I dont see it happening on my end though.

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We can also look at small things as well with this. If you go the tag route; use small and conventional tag naming. tag0.reflectphysicaldamage=<value> uses more bytes that tag.reflectphysdam=<value> which also uses more bytes that tag0.rpd=<value>.

These are just small things to consider. I remember when I wasn't on the dev team; we were always told this was bad practice. If anyone remembers; Naz and I went round to round over things like this. Sometimes Naz was right; sometimes I could make a point or post one script and prove my point. Tags were never bad. They were bad back in the day with low rate PC hosts, buggy servers with memory leaks, and just limited usage of them. Now there is so many ways to take advantage of them; I suggest for people to reconsider their use. A tag is like making a definition or class in the hardcode. We do it with all programming. So why not use it to your advantage in softcoding? It could save you a lot of memory and create some really nice systems for yourself.