ideas
towngen said:
It not going to take long to start with the output part of the program so fire away with any more suggestions you have.
As far as customizability, I'm starting to realize that my original plan of just creating the tool I really wanted to have as a DM will leave a lot of people frustrated. Adding a list of custom gods would be relatively easy, so I guess I'll need to decide on what method I'm going to use to support it.
But, adding more/different races will get really tricky when it comes to applying racial preferences for different occupations. In an orc city, some of the occupations won't even exist. Most of my logic will break down for all kinds of different things. I really don't think I'm going to support this kind of thing. Not yet anyway. I need to make it work good for normal stuff first, then worry about weird stuff later. [/B]
hehehehe you asked for it. ;D
I would suggest the easiest way to handle user defined data just be in plain txt files. Provide a list of tags that the user can change. i.e.
Occupation:Fisher
Occupation:City Guard
Occupation:Bar Wench
etc...
This would allow a LOT of flexibility if all your doing is reading the names that the user supplies. Most of your calculations are not really dependant on the names of things, but what people set the bar/% to... so this should be fairly simple (I know enough VB to get into serious trouble, but not enough to be useful. ;p).
Using a txt based file, a user could then make multiple 'Town Generator' files and opt to load the ones they needed at that moment (Load Data Set/Unload Data Set in the options menu to select which files the user wants).
Allow National Armor/City Guards/Milita to have # of units Like Wizards/Churches/Merc Groups. Add a button that opens a new window to define these units/organizations (By name, Unit #, Breakdown of units, Churches, Guilds, etc)
Allow specifying each Guild/Group/Tradesmen a differing size and name (generic is good, but most DM's have multiple organizations of varying sizes).
By using plain txt files, you remove that much more hardcoding that has to be done, and you only need to focus on making the tag names and the GUI and output sheets.
I've attached a simple example of what I mean... just a couple things mentioned above... If you like, I would be more than happy to write up a complete list of stuff that I as a long time GM would find highly useful, that I have customized for my game world... I work on PCGen which uses plain txt files as well, so the tag idea is from that (Another reason I was plugging Java, PCGen is written in Java. ;p)... but if you opt to use plain txt files, I can badger one of the coders of PCGen into making a simple interface in PCGen to import your output (Thus making about many, MANY users of PCGen VERY happy, and getting more exposure for yourself.
)
Mynex
- #1 Evil assistant to the PCGen Code Monkeys (Code Badgerer)
- PCGen Document & List File Silverback
- RPG Gateway - Software Section Editor
- RPG Reviews - d20 section Editor/Reviewer
