Character Gen project

[Maugh]

Chris and I had an excellent conversation about a character generation and content browsing tool, which Chris has made a lot of progress on. Cara has also shown interest in helping with a GUI or interface for this thing. Basically, Chris has done this kind of work before, (setting up GUI's for practical applications,) so he knows how, but really does not enjoy doing it. Cara wants to help with this stuff, and has the wit to learn any programming she doesn't already know. I'm posting this so that you two can collaborate, and I've given you each others' emails. Caleb has also shown interest in helping work on something like this, and Aubrey wants to see the design of anything that touches the website, so I've included them as well.

Here is an overview to bring Cara up to speed with what this application is designed to do:

1. The application involved is a web-application that should allow a player to browse through all the content in a convenient, (and pretty) way, through the web-browser, without having to reference a book or build a character. (This means that the information will all be in a database-readable format. We're working on this, and in the worst case scenario, I am willing to import the data manually.)

2. The application should involve a step-by-step character generation process that allows a player to build a character at any skill level. This process should follow the same order and presentation of information that is in the book, so as to be consistent.

3. The application should display what all of the 'vital statistics,' are for the built character, and should present that character's full character sheet in a nice way, preferably a way that looks similar if not identical to the character sheet.

4. When selecting abilities, the application should be able to filter out which abilities are available to that character, based on their current skills and attributes.

5. The application should be able to save characters to a database on the site, so that they can retrieve their characters later and continue editing/leveling them up, and should be able to print characters to paper or export some printable format to the computer.

6. The application should be adaptable for creating monsters, which means creating abilities on the fly for individual characters. (I don't want them to be able to add content to the database.)

7. If possible, there should be some way of organizing the saved characters, and a way for us to access the monsters/chars that have been built if we want to use them in a Book of Important People or Critter Compendium.

8. I need to be able to edit this database in case something does change. The content is mostly stable, but there are some things that still shift from time to time. So long as I can edit them manually, to make corrections or changes, then I'm good. This means I would need to be able to see and navigate the database content. If chris shows me how to do that once it's up on the site, I don't need a pretty format.

[Maugh]

All right. I've talked with a couple people about this, and I kind of wanted to check up on it and see if any progress had been made.

Chris was doing the main programming for it, building the actual application.
I was going to data-entry the content.
Cara wanted to work on GUI kind of stuff, to provide a sort of face to it.
Caleb was going to help me by writing some scripts to help import the data.

From my end of things, I've got most of the data entered. Everything but the Ch'i and Arcane magic is in. THe Arcane magic should be pretty easy, I'm just waiting for Caleb to finish his scripts, and I haven't even taken a crack at the ch'i, yet, but that shouldn't be too bad. Worst case scenario is that I have to have Caleb help me write a script, which shouldn't be hard after he does the one he's got.

I don't think Cara has gotten anywhere, but I also don't know if she's had any contact with Chris. I know Chris has a functional program, but it will need to be set up to interact with the database file that I am working on, and it probably needs a facelift. It will also need to get integrated into the site, which will be great.

I'm really looking forward to seeing this work. Let me know, everybody, if there's anything else I can do to help this work.

[Maugh]

Okay, I've now added in the Ch'i, and cleaned up a few things in the database that Caleb told me would make it more programmer-friendly. All I need now to have a complete database of the content is Caleb's work on the spells. I sort of manually tweaked the Ch'i, which comes out to 136 stances. I would manually do the spells, but really, the ch'i took me about two hours, and it was a little more than a quarter of what the spells would be. I think I'll wait for Caleb to do it.