Open Gaming Content databases

[Morrus]

Haha, yeah I'm having a hard time grasping it. Is there a similar tool for other types of data that you can show?

Probably! But not that I'm personally familiar with.

I'd liken it to a copy of Excel online. But not really; it's not a spreadsheet.

You go to it, and create a database. You call it "My minis collection" or "3E Spell Compendium" or something.

You then decide that each entry in your minis collection needs a photo, a name, measurements, and whether it's plastic or metal. So you define what an entry looks like.

You then proceed to add your minis. You have lots, so you give your friends access to help you add them. Eventually you decide to just make it a big minis database and change the settings to let anybody add a mini.

Now, while you were doing that, I was creating my starships emporium. It's set up differently to your minis collection. Each entry had a ship class, description, hull size, phaser banks, and a shield rating.

So someone's looking for a mini. They come to your minis database which now has a million minis in it. They filter it by dragons, large, plastic, and get a list if suitable candidates. They don't want evil dragons, so they filter by dragons, large, plastic, not evil. They get a shorter list.

So it's a simple database tool where you create and define your databases. As a publisher, you might even choose to put closed content in it and charge for a year's access or something., allowing you to distribute content in a format like WotC's DDI Compendium. Though I'd think that paid databases would be few and far between .

Does that make more sense?

 

[Angellis_ater]

Yeah it makes a little more sense now yeah - so in essence (and excuse me for boiling this down to its bare essences here), it's Google Docs for Gamers?

 

[Morrus]

Yeah it makes a little more sense now yeah - so in essence (and excuse me for boiling this down to its bare essences here), it's Google Docs for Gamers?

Sort of, yeah! But more specialized!

 

[Mark CMG]

I'd liken it to a copy of Excel online. But not really; it's not a spreadsheet.

You go to it, and create a database. You call it "My minis collection" or "3E Spell Compendium" or something.

You then decide that each entry in your minis collection needs a photo, a name, measurements, and whether it's plastic or metal. So you define what an entry looks like.

You then proceed to add your minis. You have lots, so you give your friends access to help you add them. Eventually you decide to just make it a big minis database and change the settings to let anybody add a mini.

Now, while you were doing that, I was creating my starships emporium. It's set up differently to your minis collection. Each entry had a ship class, description, hull size, phaser banks, and a shield rating.

So someone's looking for a mini. They come to your minis database which now has a million minis in it. They filter it by dragons, large, plastic, and get a list if suitable candidates. They don't want evil dragons, so they filter by dragons, large, plastic, not evil. They get a shorter list.

So it's a simple database tool where you create and define your databases. As a publisher, you might even choose to put closed content in it and charge for a year's access or something., allowing you to distribute content in a format like WotC's DDI Compendium. Though I'd think that paid databases would be few and far between .

Does that make more sense?

Like those Library / Book Shelf sites where folks can catalog the books they have in their collection. There's got to be, or have been, dozens of those over the years.

 

[Morrus]

Like those Library / Book Shelf sites where folks can catalog the books they have in their collection. There's got to be, or have been, dozens of those over the years.

That could be one way you could choose to use it, yep.

 

[Janx]

That could be one way you could choose to use it, yep.

I thought the use case I gave covered it, but just to make sure:

user opens the site
user chooses a rule set (PathFinder)
User chooses a topic (spells)
User then can search for spells by some (or all) of the main fields a spell has (per that ruleset)

OR

User can see a table of all the spells in the system under PathFinder

User then selects a spell to see the details of it (the spell block)


So the search mode might sort of be like this (but not exactly like this):
http://www.d20srd.org/extras/d20spellfilter/

You search, you get a list, you pick an item.


The differentiator is that Morrus's tool isn't being designed specifically for PathFinder (or like how the d20SRD tool is designed specifically for d20).

So anybody can make their own searchable inventory of spells, monsters, whatever for whatever game system.

A lot of my verbiage in prior posts is about how a programmer might go about making this kind of thing possible. That kind of detail isn't relevant to what the tool will do.

 

[Morrus]

I was thinking more of a graphical filter tool for the filtering. So you have dropdowns to select a field, dropdowns to select an operator, and dropdowns to select a value. For example:

SIZE (in inches)
LEVEL
HP
AGE

IS EQUAL TO
IS LARGER THAN
IS LESS THAN
DOES NOT EQUAL
CONTAINS
DOES NOT CONTAIN

So you could use it to search:

Show me RAL PARTHA miniatures which are LARGER THAN 6" tall and DOES NOT CONTAIN "Dragon".

 

[Janx]

I was thinking more of a graphical filter tool for the filtering. So you have dropdowns to select a field, dropdowns to select an operator, and dropdowns to select a value. For example:

SIZE (in inches)
LEVEL
HP
AGE

IS EQUAL TO
IS LARGER THAN
IS LESS THAN
DOES NOT EQUAL
CONTAINS
DOES NOT CONTAIN

So you could use it to search:

Show me RAL PARTHA miniatures which are LARGER THAN 6" tall and DOES NOT CONTAIN "Dragon".

Kind of like this example:
http://help.devexpress.com/#AspNet/CustomDocument5138
The link takes you to a DevExpress page that shows a screen shot of what their filter panel control looks like (lets the user dynamically build their query like you describe.

While I like that control, and I like the DevExpress filter row (little search box beneath each column's header to filter the result set), I find normal users don't quite get it.

For some reason, an interface that builds the WHERE portion of an SQL query is only appealing to advanced users.

More literal text boxes to search for each field tends to be more intuitive for users (even though it takes up more space and looks ugly).

One interpretation of what you wrote for the search boxes:

SIZE (in inches) [operator] [value]
LEVEL [operator] [value]
HP [operator] [value]
AGE [operator] [value]

the [operator] being a drop-down to pick from:
IS EQUAL TO
IS LARGER THAN
IS LESS THAN
DOES NOT EQUAL
CONTAINS
DOES NOT CONTAIN

the [value] being a text box the user enters the criteria (ex. 11 for Level)

 

[trancejeremy]

Isn't there a danger in mixing open content and non-open content? It can give the impression that non-open content is actually open.

For instance, I was browsing this

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showwiki.php?title=d20-Modern:Empires-and-Species

And it has several Star Trek races listed. I know ADB has a license to do Star Trek, but I'm pretty sure they don't have the ability to declare things like Klingons, Romulans, and Vulcans as open content. And Kzin are even thornier, I know they were on an episode of the animated Star Trek show , so presumably ADB has a license for that, too, but I think Larry Niven also owns them as well.

Yet someone could see that, think it's open content, and make a product based on it. With Vulcans, Romulans, Klingons or Kzinti

 

[Morrus]

Yeah, a lot of products have vague or confusing OGC declarations. The worst ones are the ones which simply say "Anything in this book derived from the d20 SRD is OGC; everything else is not" leaving the reader to figure it out. So yes, it is an issue that needs to be addressed.