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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fractalwave" data-source="post: 342540" data-attributes="member: 6399">workflow definitionYeah, this is what we (another company, totally non-gaming industry) did in coming up with a way to handle similar data from disparate systems in order to allow the business software from different companies to talk to each other and talk to the banking infrastructure; purchase orders, to shipment, to invoice, to payment, etc.In that case, I was the workflow designer / business process engineer and did the database modeling.What you end up realizing is that you can't accommodate EVERYTHING. But what you can do is accommodate all the common things, just use the occassional translator. It's enough to allow communication and to allow for recognizability of the different datasets.You create an engine that takes information in, let's you tweak it according to what type it recognizes that information to be...d20, gurps, t20, d10, George's own homebrew rpg...whatever...and lets you spit it out. In this case, you don't necessarily have to allow for imports, though it'd be nice. Just create it and spit it out.We do a lot of the same type of thing in Campaign Suite. In fact, the further in development we go the more we've discovered we could do in various gaming systems with the same piece of software that it's to the point we've discussed dropping the d20 logo entirely. Why limit ourselves?But there's always something really off-the-wall that some writer does that you just can't handle and is so weird (read: imaginative) that not enough use it to justify accommodating it.I think, ultimately, you end up with an interface and work-flow that the user defines to some extent, odd as that may seem. But I'm not sure how doable that is. What we've done is a bit of a compromise on the ideal as we know the compromise is doable. Of course, if someone ever really creates a decent artificial or machine intelligence that learns rpg's... The fuzzier the better!</blockquote>

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