Zugg Software :: View topic - Creating/Using Multiple Database variables

Enchanter Joined: 11 Feb 2003 Posts: 511 Location: USA

Okay, I just want to get a picture of how to go about a new project I'm working on for Achaea. Basically, I have a set of abilities that affect a room for a length of time. I can place one of each of these abilities in a single room, tough I can have them in multiple rooms at the same (ability X in room A, and ability X in room B for example).

What I'd like to be able to do is create something that will record where I use the abilities, and track how much time remains with the abilities (from a base value). For dealing with a single room, I can pretty much accomplish this. It is when dealing with multiple rooms and concurrent use of the abilities that I can't seem to grasp going about doing for some reason.

So the situations are:

Playing of ability X in room A.
Playing of ability Y (and so on) in room A.
Playing of ability X (and so on) in room B.

EDIT: Oh, and this is the tip of the iceberg. Lots of stuff dealing with summoning the ability to another location afterwards.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

Use a record variable with keys of RoomNumber; and values of Ability#####, where the numbers are derived from either %secs or %ctime. That provides you a start time, you might want to use a second record variable to speed up time clearing. There are a few tricks you can do with %match or %regex and %expanddb to rapidly locate the Ability values if you don't want to use a second variable.

Enchanter Joined: 11 Feb 2003 Posts: 511 Location: USA

Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2007 2:31 am

That's not what he's suggesting - he's saying have the keys be the room number and the values be the Ability AND the time left.

Enchanter Joined: 11 Feb 2003 Posts: 511 Location: USA

Would this allow multiple abilities to be played in the same room? I thought the key had to be unique or else you just overwrite everything.

Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2007 6:35 am

Ahh, I see. That's a bit more complicated - the easiest way to do that would be to use %additem to make each record's value a stringlist, so it'd end up being Whatever.286=Ability285|DifferentAbility220 and so on. I know someone (I think it was MattLofton, but I can't be sure) posted functions a while ago that allowed for easy creation and manipulation of databases like that.