[pcmaster]

Hello,

I am currently writing a plugin which allows players to get ranked per stage/checkpoint (Timer), for example:

Player x has passed Stage 3 [Rank x/y]

Now, I need to store the data for that somehow.
I have thought about creating a structure like this:

StringMap a
key => level (e.g. stage 3)
value => StringMap b
StringMap b
key => auth
value => time

StringMap b would be sorted to easily find out the rank of a player. Now the question is, how much of a performance hit it would be to access data from the second StringMap.

Current code:

PHP Code:

// setting
StringMap b = new StringMap();
g_hTimes.SetValue("1", b);

// getting
g_hTimes.GetValue("1", b); 


Any help/information would be appreciated (also accepting suggestions for my data structure itself).
</span>

[Miu]

a would be faster as an arraylist, and accessing b should always be very fast irrespective of size

[pcmaster]

Well, I have switched around a bit, StringMap is a, ArrayList b now.
Now the question is, whether or not there is any way to improve this code:

I need to compare a new time to all existing times, to somehow calculate the rank a player gets (hitting the DB each time this happens is not a good idea).
Had some laggy moments, I expect the ExplodeString stuff to be slow:

PHP Code:

arraySize = dataPerLevel.Length;
    FormatEx(newRow, sizeof(newRow), "%f;%s", time, auth);
    
    for(int i = 0; i < arraySize; i++)
    {
        dataPerLevel.GetString(i, row, sizeof(row));
        ExplodeString(row, ";", explode, 2, 32);
        float existingTime = StringToFloat(explode[0]);
        
        if(time < existingTime || time == existingTime)
        {
           rank = i;
            
            dataPerLevel.ShiftUp(i);
            dataPerLevel.SetString(i, newRow);
            
            break;
      }
      ... more checks
} 


</span>

[Miu]

What's wrong with querying the DB?

[pcmaster]

That I don't want to do a full query on the table, just to update the ranks of one player.
Later on, the table will have up to 15-20k entries per map. Now if multiple people finish at once, that's gonna kill of the DB server (and cause some blocking problems).

[pcmaster]

I am also wondering, is it possible to have string (or rather char[]) properties in methodmaps?
That's the closest I could get to a C struct, meaning I could scrap the ExplodeString nonsense entirely.

[Miu]

Originally Posted by pcmaster That I don't want to do a full query on the table, just to update the ranks of one player. Later on, the table will have up to 15-20k entries per map. Now if multiple people finish at once, that's gonna kill of the DB server (and cause some blocking problems).

I would hope the software that is specifically designed to handle your data would be able to do trivial queries without dying

I think you want some kind of binary search tree if you insist on doing it yourself though

Originally Posted by pcmaster I am also wondering, is it possible to have string (or rather char[]) properties in methodmaps? That's the closest I could get to a C struct, meaning I could scrap the ExplodeString nonsense entirely.

Methodmaps don't change anything. o.o You could just have the time as a float in one arraylist and the auth in the other with the same index, or something like that.

[pcmaster]

Yea, I think I will go with the second method, storing auths in a seperate list, then referencing to them with their index.
Methodmaps I thought would be like structs, holding the data directly, saving me from doing a (I think) quite expensive ExplodeString several thousand times.

The DB is an issue, as when two people complete a stage shortly after eachother (e.g. 1 sec apart), the refresh from player A may not have been finished before player B gets updated.
And as those callbacks are asynchronous, I am not sure how well SM's arraylist would handle concurrent access.

Thanks for your help anyways!

[asherkin]

Originally Posted by pcmaster Methodmaps I thought would be like structs, holding the data directly.

There is a reason they use the custom term MethodMap rather than "class" or "struct".

Originally Posted by pcmaster And as those callbacks are asynchronous, I am not sure how well SM's arraylist would handle concurrent access.

They're asynchronous, yes, but not multi-threaded - it's an event loop.