QuestFRP Character Generator / News: Recent posts

Just an update on what I managed to get done this weekend. Gene and I discussed changes to the armor and weapons XML content on Thursday.

We eliminated Abdomen and Groin as separate pieces of armor, since we no longer have pieces that address those regions separately. Now we just have Head, Torso, Leg and Arm. We also removed ag_penalty and some other unnecessary pieces. To illustrate the changes, here's the old xml for a plate cuirass:... read more

We're finishing up the final changes in the on-line data so that we can move forward with the PHP character generator. We finished moving all of the old tables from the old system into XML format and added all of the items for the shopping lists. Since the character creation process was revamped last week, we're ready to move forward with the process of basic character creation.

We started the php character generator (installing php on devserver) and created a new table in mysql named chargen_species to hold the species that the character generator uses.

We've agreed upon the following specifications:

Cast Time: -1 means that cast time is inapplicable.
NOTE: Changed Duration: -1 now means "check out and change in future - many misc. special cases are being mapped to -1.

We are parsing the entire spell tree into the editor system. In the process we're running into all the syntax errors in the xml and are establishing the following protocols:

Changed beginnings to be like all the other IDs, its ID is no longer 1, but is the same as its contents_key, which is 2795. From now on, contents_key will match ID in all cases.

As a backup/versioning scheme we will copy the entire table row, including the contents_key into a different table.... read more

Gene and I refreshed our memories as to where we were before the holidays. We decided to put off work on the editor until later, and work on the conversion from Oracle to MySQL. Since we were relying on some Oracle XML server side functions for XML aggregation and transformation, we pulled out some old code. For single records, we're relying on a simple cf_xslt tag for transformation. Grab the XML and XSL in two queries and combine them with the tag for display. For the tables, we have to get the record set for the table, looping through and concatenating the records and wrapping them with opening and closing "table" tags. Then we treat it the same as a single record.... read more

Gene and I regenerated (again) the Spell class so that all of the information is stored in elements, rather than attributes. Then we fixed the DefaultSpell class and got the SpellEditorDialog working, and started populating some of the textfields with the loaded spell. Ran into some difficulties because I'm an idiot and wasn't properly using the DefaultSpell class (which I coded!).

After thinking about last night's coding adventure, I think I'm going to change the name of DefaultSpell to DefaultFactory - indicating it's functionality. And then move it out of the spell package and up a level into datatypes. I'm anticipating a need in the future to create default objects of various sorts (default mage spell, default cleric spell, default fighter skill, etc). I'm also going to try code up the DefaultTreeFactory, so that we can make a fake MageSpellTree, FightList, etc.... read more