Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="boB S" data-source="post: 3625203" data-attributes="member: 53280">When I brought up the "framework" idea earlier in the thread, my thoughts were along the following lines: First, the language I had in the back of my mind was Java; if done correctly it can prove to be as close to truly portable as one can get and its OOP basis fits in with some design ideas I have floating around in my head.Second, I mentioned having some sort of "wizard" to guide the user of the application in setting it up with the rules the user desired. The wizard would have to be sophisticated--it would have to be able to identify conflicts in any rules the user tried to set up. This would be a framework in the sense, for example, when the user started setting up his character classes, the program might give him generic options such as fighter, magic user, etc., that he would be free to modify. He could rename the term fighter and make it paladin and start modifying the generic properties of "fighter" to match what he wants "paladin" to be. My thinking here is then no corporate entity can claim their trade marked terminology was being infringed upon. As another example, when defining the combat tables for this new entity, paladin, the user would start typing over the existing generic values with the ones he wanted them to be. The programmer could be clever and have a pattern detection algorithm to automatically alter the as yet untyped table numbers (a la auto-completion) to match the detected pattern. Hopefully by doing tricks like this the user would be saved a lot of typing. And no lawyers could claim that that the programmer was stealing copyrighted combat tables. And so on and so on.So my hope would be that the user would NOT have to be programming-literate, he just would have to be able to fill in the blanks as the wizard guided him through the extensive setup process. When he was done, he would hopefully have a rules structure that matches how he wants to play whatever game (Fighter could be redefined as Jedi Knight and a non-D&D game could be setup for instance) he likes.Another part of this design would be that it would be possible to export one GM's rules structure to another person who could then import it into his application framework. Would save tons of typing. And hopefully these rules structures could be easily edited after being setup so that if one did import someone else's rules, he could tweak those to match what he wanted.I think something along these lines could be accomplished in practice if one had the necessary time and expertise.</blockquote>

Verification