If you're saving and loading files in a format that works or fails
based on the regional settings of the computer you're on, you're doing
it wrong.  We call load/save routines which do this 'broken' or
'buggy'.

There are well established methods of handling file save and load
which don't have any portability or regional concerns; printing to
ascii-7 using standard printf in POSIX mode is one possible way,
printing to ascii-7 for tags and numerical data and utf-8 for unicode
strings is another.  Binary formats can even be used, so long as
you're strict about byte order specification, but I would recommend
against it given the expected usage case.

Dennis Towne

On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 9:00 AM,  <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm going to take a guess and answer this question in a way that might not be 
> what you meant at all.
> Save files for a game might work fine for some people, but be considered 
> corrupted by the game when being opened by other people.  Regional settings 
> tend to separate the people who will have no trouble, and the people who 
> can't open their saved game files.  The reason is that different parts of the 
> world store numbers differently.  If a game designer forgets to account for 
> those changes, in each and every part of their game, they'll cause errors.
> As an example, lets say you are playing a game and you tell it to save.  In 
> this game the file will record how many mice your warrior has heroically 
> killed in battle, and also how much health he has left.  The first number is 
> an integer, since you can't normally kill 2.25 mice.  That first number will 
> work for anyone, no matter where in the world they live.  The second number 
> is your health, and lets assume your warrior has 95.4 health points.  That 
> decimal is where things will go wrong.  In some parts of the world a comma is 
> used instead of that decimal point, so the file will store that value as 
> 95,4.  When the game goes to load your save file, it encounters 95,4 when it 
> is expecting a number.  Well in that part of the world 95,4 is a perfectly 
> valid number, but the game was built in a place where a comma doesn't mean 
> the same thing as a decimal point.  So the game has a little melt down 
> because computers don't like surprises.
> Once again, this might not have been what you meant when you asked this 
> question, so sorry in advance if I guessed wrong.  :)
> - Aprone
>       From: Leo Cantos <[email protected]>
>  To: [email protected]
>  Sent: Friday, September 25, 2015 11:49 AM
>  Subject: [Audyssey] Save files and different regions
>
> I would like to ask a question:  how do save files  have to do with
> regional settings?
>
>
>
> I could see how they would work  with time and all however it seems that it
> would only occur if the computer was turned off unexpectedly,  then the save
> file would not save, but I don't know.
>
>
>
> I figured  I would ask as I am interested.
>
>
>
> Leo
>
>
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