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.
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D&D 3.5 is a big hurdle, indeed, and one of the big reasons that I feel this needs to be developed bottom up from the representation. Straight point-buy systems will be easy, but dealing with both point buy and level-based systems is the problem.
Ahhh... I grok the RFC thing now.
OpenRPG I see as defective simply in that it won't work on my system, and in general seems pretty fragile. I've had breakage about three-four separate times, installing stable packages on Ubuntu. Grapevine is actually pretty awesome (despite being written in Visual Basic), but it's abandonware at this point, and strongly tied to the Old WOD LARP system, Mind's Eye Theater. It's usable for tabletop WOD, but mainly through user-defined traits and other kludges. Penguinvine is a reimplementation of it for Linux in C++, but it both looks pretty stalled and is remarkably buggy, and shares Grapevine's single-RPG limitation.
That's really the big one... All of the products I've seen that have anything like Grapevine's scope in setting-management are tied to specific systems (or families of systems). The implementation of "Rumors" in Grapevine just blew me away when I ran into it, and I'd love to have something like that in any RPG I needed it for, without having to kluge it in Grapevine/Hero Lab/whatever.
I'm not particularly interested adding networking to this; I want it to be a game management system, not a tool for running games online. Part of the goal is, certainly, being able to export character sheets and rumors for internet/print distribution; also, far in the future, some sort of read-only update format might be useful (So you could give someone a read-only subset of what gameworld files are accessible to their character, say.)
I agree that OO has a number of advantages for roleplaying game representation, although in this case, it'll most likely be easiest and clearest to stick to fairly simple objects with few (if any) attached methods. Most of the OO I've done is from school (in C++ and Java), but I've got the Camel book, and I've used other people's OO libraries in Perl.
You're right about the product review... I'm searching for them right now, and I've already downloaded PCgen.
while(<DATA>){for(split(' ',$_)){$_=reverse;print "$_ ";}}
print "\b.\n";
__DATA__
tsuJ rehtonA lreP rekcaH
| [reply]
[d/l] |