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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vascant" data-source="post: 4818032" data-attributes="member: 13927">I won't say I "locked-in" the data with NPC Designer but rather created a system that would accomplish two goals, first being allow users to not just change but rather turn NPC Designer into what they want it to be instead of what I designed.  I did look at using XML but found in the end it either caused some problems or eliminated some functionality that I felt was more important then use of XML.  Keep in mind until NPC Designer no one had nor has accomplished what it does with NPC Generation and that was the priority.  This is not to say I did not avoid the drive by some users to have XML or other formats (two examples are Fantasy Grounds and DM Genie), there are output formats for these applications so you can quickly export your generated NPC directly into them.With NPC Designer I did learn a few things...  I wanted to make sure of data sets that were available already and allow users to make use of data sets as well, so Evolution has a converter for PCGen data sets into a format that Evolution can use. This worked out well enough that I purchased all of the WotC PCGen Data sets prior to the license being pulle by WotC, to be honest it worked out much better then I even had hoped when I designed it all.  I am also confident enough that easy to use editors can be coded to make creating new date fairly easy for most things.  I do like Java and have used Java since it was in its early beta stages in the 90's but I also feel there is a time and place for each tool, since I was geared more towards results and speed of the generation Java did not fit the target.  Evolution is based on .Net and I am constantly testing it against Mono (a frww Framework that has mac and linux flavor versions).</blockquote>

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