SwapMaps is great and helpful, but the file format that lummox uses can get pretty big. I wish could use SwapMaps with the .dmp file format (As in saving and loading, not just loading).

Vermolius wrote:

Efencea employed IainPeregrine.dmp_reader

As does 'Matar Redondel'.

SwapMaps as people have said, saves files in a horrible way.
It is great for small maps, but for large maps it is slow and the file sizes are horribly large.

Also, take caution when using SwapMaps. It causes conflicts with the Read/Write procs and makes them catastrophically fail if they attempt to save/load lists with a length of about 250 or longer (including inbuilt lists like contents).

As for dmp_reader/writer. The file size is much better than SwapMaps, and upto a point it is faster than SwapMaps.
But after that point (which is suprizingly small, something like 100x100) it drastically gets slower and slower. At a certain point it basically becomes unusable because it is taking a good several hours to read/write a single map.

My advice is simple. If you want to use dynamic map saving/loading, keep it small scale (200x200 or smaller). BYOND is just not designed to effectively handle maps larger than this, and definately cannot be made to efficiently save/load maps this large.