> Re: LORD's Pascal Structure
> By: Donald Tidmore to Gregg Somes on Thu Feb 05 2004 01:38 am
>Donald, you are right and I was wrong .. the Fairy is pureely dynamic 
and live > only as a session instance which can be passed and used or 
deleted by an IGM. > I apologize and hope this issue can rest :) >
Gregg

I won't ever claim to be the best Lord igm author, and there are many times
when I have to get help on a problem from friends.  But I've been immersed
in the Lord programming for over three years now, including the time spent
learning about the LADY script language.  So I was fairly sure that I was
right about fairy handling.  

There are some things about LORD that none of us will ever know about for
sure, unless LORD is sold to someone who makes its code available to
others.  One can do a lot of things, as I learned developing my  Lord
Player Editor Utilty (LPEDIT), with the Lord player.dat structure fields,
the marbard.dat and marrage.dat NPC files, and LORD data files like
lognow.txt.  But Lord utility programs can't access INFO.* files since they
only exist while LORD is executing, and passing data to IGMs.

Since I released Lpedit, for instance, I learned from trial and error that
while LORD is running, it does not allow Lpedit to update data in
player.dat for an online player.  Example.  Player 1 Belgarion is  online
in Node 0, in first dos session.  You open second DOS session.   Open
Lpedit in it, and make changes to belgarion's record.  You can save  the
data, but Lord does not pay any attention to changes to Belgarion's record
afterwards.  I am relatively sure that while Lord is handling any  active
players it only allows data changes that it makes or that an IGM  makes
while it is handling that player's data record.

One could make changes to say player 3's record, in lpedit, and those might
be accepted, while player 1 was in Lord.  But the only two programs allowed
to change data in player 1's record are Lord itself, and the IGM the player
is accessing.  At least as well as I can make out.

As for Fairy coding, sure you can write a Lord utility program to create an
info. file and have it say FAIRY YES.  But when Lord loads
it would not pay any attention to that, I think.  At any rate, everyone
knows from Seth long ago that players lose fairies as soon as they stop
playing or are killed.  So there is no way to access Fairy in LORD IGMs
except through the info.* files.

Now you can give/take a fairy in the Lord LADY script language, provided
that you are using Lord 4.07 beta, and a compile version that is dated
after April 2002 which is when Michael Preslar made the &Pfa variable
active.   One thing I had wished to be able to do with Lpedit that I
couldn't figure out a way to do, was to let the user toggle the status of
fields like Clean Mode like Lordcfg can do.  Or change the value of the Max
bank transfers fields.  But since the structure of Lord.dat was never
released, none of us besides Seth and Michael know how it works.  And to my
knowledge nothing was ever released publicly to show the structure or
purpose of the playext.dat and playext2.dat files.  But I assume that they
store data details on a player's record that lord.dat and player.dat do not
handle.  

Good luck with your new Lord igm programming.  Let me know if you need any
assistance.  I'll take the Jenny's Kitchen igm patch out of circulation
myself, but I can't make others do the same thing.  If you'll include your
email address, we could discuss things better and easier.

BTW, the message I sent you is in the NetMail conference, and you have to
request it from your sysop I think before you can read/write mail in it. 
Its purpose is to send mail from one fidonet user to another using their
name and their Fidonet number address, which is private mail.  Your bbs
sysop can see such mail but no one else can who are not either the sender
or designated receiver.

If you have specific questions on how Lord works, you can always try to get
some level of support from Michael preslar at mpreslar{at}mailcity.com or
mike{at}lordlegacy.com.  But I would not advise holding your breath waiting
for him to respond, as he is known by many including myself to not like
email I think.  If you have ICQ though, you might be able to get a hold of
him that way and have a real-time conversation with him. His number is ICQ
#9590896, and he usually uses "Z" as a handle if I recall right. 
You probably can also reach him on the current Lord/32 telnet test BBS site
at telnet://ztest.myip.us/.

If you log into http://www.filegate.net/8080/bbbs  - NO ending backslash.
You can use Join/Resign Message bases after you register and access the
Netmail conference that way.  Donald

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