Synopsis: Loading/changing offline players. December 96
From: erwin@pip.dknet.dk
To: MERC/Envy Mailing List <merc-l@webnexus.com>
Subject: Re: editing a string of a file online

On Sun, 8 Dec 1996, do i care? wrote:

> let's say you want to remove someone who is not on off a clan:
> offline you will edit his file and remove the line with the clan field,
> but what i wanan do is do everything online,

The best solution would be not to keep clan data in a player file, but
rather keep the list of players in the clan file (and so, always online). 
Then, when a player logs on, set his ->clan to point at whatever clan he
is in, so you don't have to look every clan up if you want to check clan
membership. 

You could also load the off-line player, change his clan field, save him, 
and free him. 

Set up a "fake" descriptor, as load_char_obj takes one, and then load the 
player, something like:

DESCRIPTOR_DATA d;

if (!load_char_obj(&d, name)) /* validate name first! */
	no player with that name
else
	d.character->desc = NULL - to make sure nothing will send to this 
				   fake descriptor by accident
	Move the character to the proper room, including pets and such
	remove from clan
	Move the character (and pets) to the room where he was when loaded
	save_char_obj(d.character)
	do_quit(d.character,"");

Of course, you have to make sure that the player really isn't online 
while this happens, as then this will have bad results :)

Also, you need to make absolutely sure that you do everything that the 
game does when entering a new player: this especially includes moving the 
pet to the location with the character.

I use roughly the above technique for a command that loads offline players
so I can do fun things to them :P I don't quit them, they simply stay
linkdead, and I can force them/advance them/demote/examine their inventory
them etc. - which is a bit easier than finding the player file and
editting it (considering the server is quite far away from me). 


==============================================================================
Erwin Andreasen  Viby J, Denmark   Computer Science Student at Aarhus Business
erwin@pip.dknet.dk        <URL:http://pip.dknet.dk/~pip1773>           College
==============================================================================

[This post originally used d->character rather than d.character, as pointed
out by Eric Kidder]