D&D 4E Completely Unofficial 4e Dataset Xml Schema and Discussion (Updated 7/02)

[Asmor]

Quite true. Now, do I have the slightest confidence they can come up with a good schema? No. But of course there is always a first time... Anyone have any idea when this character creator is likely to actually materialize? hehe.

Doesn't matter of it's good, the only thing that matters is making sure whatever everyone else does is compatible with what WotC's doing, even if that means encoding everything in a proprietary data format based on sanskrit.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Doesn't matter of it's good, the only thing that matters is making sure whatever everyone else does is compatible with what WotC's doing, even if that means encoding everything in a proprietary data format based on sanskrit.

Yeah, except then I wouldn't use it because it would be worthless to me, lol

But hey, the XML posted there looks OK. Unfortunately WOTC botched on CB and wrote it in WPF .net 3.5!!! Going to be a LONG time before we're running that over here in Linux land. BUT as some people pointed out on the forum, if WOTC will just give us the XSD for this stuff and an API (SOAP?) and a WSDL file, then us Enterprise Java guys are all set. I eat that stuff for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I can have a usable AJAX or RCP based UI for what I want to do in a week. For that matter why bother? Just glue support into MapTool and CharacterTool (http://rptools.net in case you haven't tried it) to do an XSLT transform to the .rptok format. They're already in the process of backing javaScript support into that as well. You can already display most anything you want to with the ugly macro langauge (HTML based), so its 99% of the way there. Plus MapTool is a fine VTT, we play from all across the US in my group.

 

[Oldtimer]

Mia?

So, I suppose the efforts of jimmifett is for nothing, since the site hosting his files seems to have died?

Anyone else who has given some thought to XML schemas for 4E data?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, WotC obviously has no interest in interoperating with anyone else's code and seems pretty determined to make sure there are no tools but their own, even when they HAVE no tool. The CB XML is titanically complex and who knows how it works? It would be great to be able to say XSLT it into a maptool .rptok format or HTML, etc. It ain't going to happen though. It looks to me like it would take a LOT of work to figure out how to transform it, and its a moving target. I can't really see much point in a separate set of schema for 4e stuff since pretty much everyone uses CB and now a couple of other tools they finally released. So yeah, its pretty much a dead issue. Nobody is going to bother when if you actually built something cool that people started to use WotC will just swoop in and shut you down. Waste of time.

 

[nix4]

Altova XML Spy has a function to read XML and create a schema file from it. It could be possible to start with a very elaborate CB XML file and generate a schema that might get you 60%+ there...

But its a on-going project and someone whould have to maintain it etc., XSLT/XSL-FO could be used to create a stylesheet and be processed by Xalan and FOP to produce PDF or HTML output that looks the same as WoTCs stat blocks etc.,

 

[BruntFCA]

Well, WotC obviously has no interest in interoperating with anyone else's code and seems pretty determined to make sure there are no tools but their own, even when they HAVE no tool. The CB XML is titanically complex and who knows how it works? It would be great to be able to say XSLT it into a maptool .rptok format or HTML, etc. It ain't going to happen though. It looks to me like it would take a LOT of work to figure out how to transform it, and its a moving target. I can't really see much point in a separate set of schema for 4e stuff since pretty much everyone uses CB and now a couple of other tools they finally released. So yeah, its pretty much a dead issue. Nobody is going to bother when if you actually built something cool that people started to use WotC will just swoop in and shut you down. Waste of time.

Maybe you already know, but Veggiesama has made (based on james manhattens stuff) a way that you can copy the Char Summary into the clipboard and then just paste it into a special token. This then gets parsed into the correct fields in map tool.

A quick connect to the Compendium to DL the power descriptions and you're more or less set.

On a related issue a chaps over at Fantasy Grounds 2 VTT and at Four Ugly monsters have worked on a nice Parser and 4e ruleset that allows you to parse from the Compendium directly into a Fantasy Grounds 2 module; this is even farther than maptool has gone.

Also the guy at iplay4e has done a pretty good job of reading in the Char Builder xml files from what I can see.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, people have slowly made progress. The Compendium is a LOT easier to deal with than the character format in some respects. I have perl code that can do what parsing of that is possible, which is useful. iplay4e works reasonably well and going by that I would say that there are certain possibilities, it would just be a LOT easier if there were a published schema (for instance XML Beans would work great with that). You can generate schemata from example XML but its not quite the same thing, though still handy sometimes.

I still don't like the .dnd4e XML format that much, but we can live with it. The real hitch is what can you actually DO with the data? Making Maptool tokens is probably not going to create problems, but it would be nice if they would have created a usable license.

Anyway, the tool situation has gotten somewhat better. There are still some missing bits that would be nice to have though.