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Message: <blockquote data-quote="frugal" data-source="post: 1533383" data-attributes="member: 12517">D&D rules like most things in life follow the 80/20 rule: 80% of the rules are straightforward and easy, 20% of the rules are a complete nightmare.Have you ever looked at the monster advancement rules for 3.0?A decent PC generator has to cope with 3.0 and 3.5 the differences in rules are subtle and complicated. We have been trying for 12 months to come up with and XML representation of the rules and keep hitting "exception cases".Consider something simple like "Greater Weapon Focus", you can only take GWF for a weapon that you have already taken "Weapon Focus" for. So you need to do the following:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Mark a character as having a particular feat</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Mark the particular feat (weapon focus) with a particular weapon</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Be able to examine the user to see if they have the weapon Focus feat</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Be able to examine the feat assigned to the character to get the weapons that it specifices</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">assign a new feat to the character based on one of those weapons.</li> </ol>And you need to be able to dop all of that without hard coding the feats as a special case. PCGen is the only character generator I have seen that does this and even then it hardcodes some parts of that operation.You also need to be able to query the character in quite complex ways: "You are only allowed to take this class if you can cast 3 different arcane spells at level 4 or above". That is quite difficult unless you hardcode the concepts of spells and spell levels into the program. It is possible to do it with generic "leveled objects" but you still need a querying language that can extract the information.So not only do you need to encode the concepts in a generic way, but you need to write a query language that is both generic and high level enough that users can work with it.D&D utilities are written by gamers to satisfy a particular need. 90% of the people who write open suorce programs are not professional programmers, and of the 10% who are they do not want to spend their time writing high level design documents to make it easy for newcomers to the project (they get enough of that at work I can assure you).In general assume that getting any 2 people to work on a project (they are not being paid for) in the same way is like trying to get an octopus in a string bag. the more people you add to the project the larger the holes in the bag get ;O)There is no one on the PCGen team (that I know of) who is skilled in Interface design and ergonomics. Professional teams can hire a designer or two to make the product polished, free product have to hope that they can fnid a gamer who works as a designer and who care enough to put up with the developers who just want to hack something together and do not want to spend 3 times as long writing the interface as they currently do.With regard to editing races, classes etc. As far as PCGen goes the developers do not generally enter data so they do not use the editors, nor do they know what a user wants from the editors. The data entry guys use a text editor because they want to work at a lower level and are entering large lumps of data. So you end up with a few users who try to enter their own classes with no one to support them.FrugalPCGen developerProfessional Software Engineer.</blockquote>

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