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Age of Sigmar Battle Simulator Development thread

Discussion in 'General Hobby/Tabletop Chat' started by ravagekitteh, Apr 21, 2019.

  1. The Red Devil
    Stegadon

    The Red Devil Defender of Hexoatl Staff Member

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    Making a change for the sake of doing a change is never a good thing, we can agree on that.

    Though as long as the application is designed right, replacing the way it accepts input (or adding new ones it accepts in addition) should be a minor change. The controller will just initiate JSON instead of XML and inject that to the parser.

    Note. I have no idea how long you have worked in the industry and in what genre, but while working with APIs and across multiple devices/languages switching to JSON over a decade ago made everything so much easier (and lightweight) compare to working with XML / SOAP.
     
  2. Aginor
    Slann

    Aginor Fifth Spawning Staff Member

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    I agree, I'd take JSON over XML any day.
    The reason why I suggested CSV and XML is that they are easy to read and write for non-programmers.
     
  3. Canas
    Slann

    Canas Ninth Spawning

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    O, certain changes have their advantages, and over the years it adds up. And especially when starting something new it's worthwhile to start with the fanciest stuff you can get your hands on. But what annoys me is that software engineers have a tendency of changing for the sake of change, or for the sake of having the shiniest new tools, though the advantages might not actually add anything. And this goes for a lot of things where a software engineer says "X is better than Y cuz of Z". Z rarely actually matters to anyone but them.

    To stick with our current JSON example, it might be more lightweight, but I very much doubt @ravagekitteh 's simulator is ever going to reach a level of complexity where that'l actually matter. Noone's going to notice if it runs in 0.01 ms or 0.02. At which point it becomes much more valuable that for example the actual messages are far easier to read and understand in XML and CSV since JSON isn't exactly designed for human readability.
     
  4. Aginor
    Slann

    Aginor Fifth Spawning Staff Member

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    The main problem with CSV is that it allows only relatively simple structures. That's fine if you don't need something more complex, and it is stupidly easy to parse, even if you have to write the parser yourself.

    But with XML or JSON you leave more options open for future changes.
    So yeah it is a tradeoff.
     
  5. Canas
    Slann

    Canas Ninth Spawning

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    Yeah, CSV vs JSON/XML has fairly clear tradeoffs here. But the differences with XML vs JSON are much less significant in this case.
     

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