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Message: <blockquote data-quote="towngen" data-source="post: 416908" data-attributes="member: 1528">Greetings all!As some of you may be aware, I am creating a town generation program.  Having thought for quite a while about the state of the computer programs that are written for this community, both commercial and non-commercial, it occured to me that one of the big missing things from all the programming efforts is interapplication compatability.One of the reasons that D&D 3e has been the success it has (IMO) is the whole idea of an RPG standard, so everyone can participate and add something.  Granted some of the specific licensing issues seem to have stifled some of the creative contributions people have tried to make, but perhaps we can "get around" some of these licensing issues by letting applications talk to one another.Suppose I have a great character generation utility.  The user interface is awesome, it prints beautiful character sheets, etc...  BUT, it only has the core material in it because of licensing and copyright issues.  Suppose another utility has all the material I want in it, but I don't want to use it all the time for whatever reason.  Wouldn't it be great if I could simply export the character from 1 utility to the other, make some changes, then export it back prior to printing?Or suppose I really like a certain NPC generator out there, but I can't stand the names it creates for the NPC's.  And there is also a really cool name generator program out there.  Wouldn't it be cool if I could write a program that would tell the NPC generator to create some NPCs, then import them from the NPC generator, and call the name generator to rename them, then stuff them in a database for by a campaign management utility.Anyway, this idea would require the support of the other applications programmers out there to implement in their programs to work, but it would allow the end user to <potentially> have a richer and better set of programs to select from.  And yes, I do have a slightly ulterior motive I will confess to.  I am lazy and don't feel like adding an NPC stat generator into my town generator, it would be much easier to simply make use of another program for that purpose.  Plus it makes it easier to avoid having to release the program using either the d20 or OGL licenses if my program doesn't contain any of that stuff.So, after my feeble attempt to justify why I think this is a good idea, here is my idea:Let's create a public domain, royalty free, platform independent, programming API to allow for interapplication communication.So far, the only solution I can think of that can handle such a requirement would be to have the applications communicate through a TCP/IP session.  As far as I know every platform in existence that is worth mentioning can talk TCP/IP.  You can simply connect to yourself to allow a communications session, but you don't necessarily have to restrict the API to a single machine.  A remote machine could have the application you are linking to.At this point, the communications would simply be a comm channel to allow 2 applications to send strings to one another.  We would need to develop all the particulars, such as possibly restricting it to only TCP not UDP, assigning a default port address, figuring out who should monitor the ports, for an how to validate connections, etc...It seems to me that XML would be the logical choice for the format of the data to send.  The API would define a set of specific tags and their meanings.  I'm not an expert on XML at all, but from what I've read this seems to be a good way of handling the format of the data.  By sending ONLY standard ASCII strings (no binaries), machine independence is assured even if speed is somewhat diminished.So anyway, please comment on what you think.  I'd like to from both developers and non-developers.Specifically:From non-developers:  Would software that had the ability to communicate like this have much additional value for you?  (ie. is it worth our effort to develop?)  What kind of things would you like to be able to have programs do for each other?  Etc...From developers: Obviously, I'd like to hear any techinical problems you see with my idea, as well as any improvements you can think of.  Do you see any advantage to such a standard existing?  Or would it be a disadvantage to any extent?  Assuming a reasonably positive response from non-developers, do you think you might implement something like this in YOUR software?  Would you like to help develop such a standard?  Are there any people out there who are experts in XML that can advise me/us on if that is a good idea, or should a more primitive form of communications be used?  Is there any functionality you specifically wouldn't want to share, or viseversa?   Etc...From anybody:  Other issues/ideas I forgot to include.Cheers!Walter</blockquote>

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