I have to admire your ambition.

First of all I didn't see in your list pcgen or anything else on source forge. pcgen is fairly ambitious in terms of flexibility though limited to d20 and has quite a large team working on it. However your project seems to be at least as ambitious as that.

I guess if I was embarking on your particular adventure I would do the following:

1. Try to rumble up some interest on various forums. So I suppose this is a good start. Are you posting on any others?
2. Get a more complete list of potential competitors and review their advantages and disadvantages.
3. Try to propose a good clean, maintainable and extensible architecture for your application. I would publish it out as an RFC on the most suitable forum.
4. Try to set some very limited goals for the first phase of the project.
5. Only then would I start coding.

Very good and helpful suggestions. I'll take a look at PCGen, although its focus on D20 makes it unsuitable for some of my uses.

In terms of limited goals... I was thinking that it might make sense to try doing the project as tools-up development; namely, create an RPG description file by hand first, then create a tool to read, display, and edit said file, then do the same for the character files, setting files, etc.

I'm coming at this from hobbyist levels... where would I find info on correctly writing an RFC for the project?

In terms of limited goals... I was thinking that it might make sense to try doing the project as tools-up development; namely, create an RPG description file by hand first, then create a tool to read, display, and edit said file, then do the same for the character files, setting files, etc.

At minimum, I would consider the goals for 1.0 to be:

• RPG description file format parser and one RPG format file completed. Probably for something like Paranoia, with fairly simple character-attribute relationships.
• Character parser set up, to read and write character files and display onscreen.
• Character entry system works well enough to enter in a character from a sheet.

Does that sound reasonable?

while (<DATA>){foreach (split (' ', $_)){ $bub = reverse $_;print "$bu
+b ";}};print "\b.\n";
__DATA__
tsuJ rehtonA lreP rekcaH
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I think a simple game would be good to start with. But given your ambitious goals, whilst you are designing I would ask oneself would this work for say AD&D 3.5. Particularly in reference to that system, I would observe that very often it feels that sometimes X is defined in terms of Y and sometimes the other way round. Can you cope with all of those complexities?

"RFC" means "request for comments" so its not such a big deal. If it is going to be in perl it should be posted under mediatations here.

Could you be more specific about what you see as defective in the tools you mention as I have not come across them? Also you didn't mention any vision for connectivity. Do you have no plans for the tools to either within a local network or to prepare files for upload to the internet?

Also how familar are you with object orientation and do you have a favourite OO technology? RPGs I think cry out for OO design.

I guess I cannot emphasise the importance of doing a product review. It would provide you with a better idea of the what works, what does not and what you are letting yourself in for.

Your sig would be a little smaller as:

$_='tsuJ rehtonA lreP rekcaH';print"@{[$_=reverse]} "for split;
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