James Cameron <quozl at us.netrek.org> wrote:
>
>The .players file is a flat array of player stat struct entries.  It is
>searched sequentially to find the relevant entry during login, then a
>pointer to the entry is kept by the ntserv process for updates to the
>player's stats as they die.

Flat arrays are evil.

Maybe just create a B*-Tree index on the file so that the server can query the names easily.  I think I still have my CS361 data structures book if you need help. :)

At the very least using a psuedo database like MySQL will save the time of writing indexing code.  Don't ask me how to do this, I use VB and it's only 4 lines of code in my world. :)