I don’t understand how editing a number in an excel file is any easier than editing a number in a text file. What was it that made the difference?
Or don't, since SCMs are much better at diffing plain text than either.
> Also Excel could have formulas which might be useful somewhere and supporting formulas in config file is another level of complexity and almost certainly it'll be worse than Excel.
You'll have an easier time reimplementing Excel's formula system than basic arithmetic? I find that hard to believe.
I'm not sure you understood what the parent was saying? This seems like a non sequitur.
In a spreadsheet, derived values can be updated instantly. Say you want to upgrade a bandit from leather armor to chainmail (6 or so equipment items changed), and then verify that his total defense and modified movement speed are still within reasonable ranges for the part of the game where he appears. With a text file, you've got some arithmetic to do. With a spreadsheet, it's there at a glance.
Or say your enemies are missing too much, and you want to give them +10% accuracy across the board, for all of 50+ enemies. In a text file, that's a lot of cursoring around. In a database, you could knock together a query to do it, but that still might take a couple of minutes, depending. In a spreadsheet, I could do it in 15 seconds. (And if I screw it up, a couple of Ctrl-Zs puts everything back where it started. That's not so easy in a database.)
And, y'know, a lot of programmers really underestimate the value of good formatting. A database can spit out nice columnar tables easily, but a spreadsheet can do things like put borders between stat clusters related to different categories; automatically color-code data so you can see at a glance what the highest and lowest values in a given column are, or spot out-of-range derived values; add alternate-row shading to make it easier to scan across a long row; and on and on. That is useful. It lets you find and correlate the data you want faster with fewer errors. Not everything has to be viewed in flat text.
[1] https://www.airpair.com/neo4j/posts/modelling-game-economy-w...
Both approaches have tradeoffs:
- TSV files can have so many columns that you can't really edit them in a text editor, you'll never find your place. Some of these in D2 have more than 256 columns.
- INI files don't give you a full list of configurable parameters, so you might not even know what flags the engine supports if they're mentioned only once in the entire file or not mentioned at all. Some object types in Red Alert 2 support over 700 flags, not all of them are actually used in the default config…
- two items described in a TSV file are easier to compare than two INI sections, with INI you need a second editor window and some ordering of the keys to make sense of things.
- on the other hand, diffing a TSV file for changes is a lot more challenging.
At the time, I remember thinking how a proper database would make this easier.
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I have also seen a game where a \n was used as a record separator and \r was used to insert newlines into the text string within a record. Fun times when your text editor tries to "intelligently" handle and normalize line endings.
And non developer can easily write own formula to next cell whenever he feels like and don't need to wait for programmer, don't need to explain and don't need to fight if programmer happen to be stubborn.
Even seeing what depends on what is easier with right excel plugin then debugging scripting code.