CMP: On its way out?

[kingpaul]

I kind of wondered how this would impact PCGen, too.

Well, CMP has nothing to do with PCGen development. They make datasets to work with PCGen. Granted, the lapse of the WotC license has caused no small amount of consternation among our user base because they didn't have the time/inclination/etc to create their own datasets.

After all, it isn't much use without datasets.

That's true. But PCGen comes bundled with numerous datasets, and the number is going up...in fits and spurts to be honest. But it does go up.

I'm not too psyched about adding lists of monsters or spells, but the rest isn't bad at all.

Spells, IMO, are the easiest of *.lst files to do.

 

[Mercule]

That's true. But PCGen comes bundled with numerous datasets, and the number is going up...in fits and spurts to be honest. But it does go up.

True. I'm probably in the minority of PCGen users, though, as I only use WotC books, so 3rd party datasets don't really even register for me.

Spells, IMO, are the easiest of *.lst files to do.

Again, I'm probably atypical because I get much, much more annoyed at line length than I do at bizarre twists of logic in implementing datasets. I'd rather enter all the PHB classes than ten spells, just because I can do the classes without scrolling right.

Hmm... I guess I could throw that out as a request of some sort -- I want an editor that formats the .lst files vertically, rather than horizontally. That and syntax highlighting (with an intellitype-like feature) would pretty well do it for me. I'll hold my breath.

 

[kingpaul]

Hmm... I guess I could throw that out as a request of some sort -- I want an editor that formats the .lst files vertically, rather than horizontally.

I'm not aware of any that do that.

That and syntax highlighting (with an intellitype-like feature) would pretty well do it for me. I'll hold my breath.

There are several text editors (TextPad and UltraEdit IIRC, among others) that have a highlighting scheme created for them. I use Notepad, but that's just me.

 

[2WS-Steve]

Hmm... I guess I could throw that out as a request of some sort -- I want an editor that formats the .lst files vertically, rather than horizontally.

That's one advantage of an XML format.

What I do when working with .lst files is have a macro set up to switch from tab-delimited to paragraph delimited, then back again. That makes it much easier to do data entry.

 

[kingpaul]

That's one advantage of an XML format.

What I do when working with .lst files is have a macro set up to switch from tab-delimited to paragraph delimited, then back again. That makes it much easier to do data entry.

How do you do that?

 

[2WS-Steve]

I'm using UltraEdit -- but you should be able to do this in most other programs.

The Macro for PCGEN tabbed to Paragraphs just goes:

FIND {paragraph mark} REPLACE WITH {tab}###
FIND {tab} REPLACE WITH {paragraph mark}

I only run the macro within selected text, instead of the whole file -- don't want to convert the header rows for instance. In effect, it converts the lines to paragraph-mark-delimited text, with ### (or some other string that you're confident won't appear elsewhere) serving as the end of item delimiter.

To convert back basically just have a macro that does the opposite:


FIND {paragraph mark} REPLACE WITH {tab}
FIND {###} REPLACE WITH {paragraph mark}


It creates some junk tabs and empty lines, but those are okay to ignore or easy to clean out. Someone with actual skillz could, I'm sure, do a better job.

I also think it would be fairly easy to just build into PCGEN if you wanted to switch into a different file format -- simply allow ### delimited files and have PCGEN run the formatter before loading the .lst file. Though I imagine working with two different file formats could cause problems.


I will definitely say that it's much easier to read and edit the converted files. No trying to keep track of things in column 1500 and I've found that doing data entry is easy, since I can just scroll down and paste say, SOURCE information in a bunch of entries, or easily copy and paste pre-reqs between feats, or, for long items, have text wrap and line numbers on so I can tell when the field ends.

 

[Mercule]

I'm not aware of any that do that.

Me either. I've toyed with the idea of writing a dedicated .lst file editor that does just that, but it never gets high enough priority. Maybe after my two-year old is off to college.

There are several text editors (TextPad and UltraEdit IIRC, among others) that have a highlighting scheme created for them. I use Notepad, but that's just me.

I use PSPad. It does the color-coding. I just threw the statement in there for completness. Actually, I'd kill (okay, maybe just maim) for an editor that has Intellisense like VS 2005 (or Eclipse, probably, but that's not my platform).

 

[iwarrior-poet]

Guys---maybe you could start a different thread to discuss the PCGen stuff---or just head over to their website.

 

[Gnal]

Guys---maybe you could start a different thread to discuss the PCGen stuff---or just head over to their website.

PCGen does not have a website with forums. It has a Yahoo list

 

[Mercule]

PCGen does not have a website with forums. It has a Yahoo list

Which I cannot reach from work.

Besides, this is the D&D Utilities forum on the board. So, discussing PCGen is pretty much exactly what we're supposed to be doing here.