[freeroleplay] Re: Generics
- From: Samuel Penn <sam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: freeroleplay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 13:25:18 +0100
On Tuesday 11 May 2004 13:15, Per Inge Mathisen wrote:
> On Tue, 11 May 2004, Ricardo Gladwell wrote:
> > Many of us on this list have hypothised about writing RPG software that
> > access the actually rules/content in a dynamic fashion... i.e. reading
> > XML configuration files at initialisation.
Well, all my documentation is already in XML format, so in theory this
should be easy - at least for PC generator type stuff.
> This is possible, of course. However, it is by no means simple, and
> presents a very big hurdle for the software developer. A computer game
> doing this needs to do it _fast_, a consideration PCGen does not need.
Not a problem. Read it at startup, and cache it in some binary format.
> It is also quite problematic when you consider things like spells. How do
> you represent a 'Mass Charm Person' or a 'Seduction' spell in XML without
> any knowledge of the internals of the computer game's AI? It is possible,
> certainly, but quickly gets complicated. You also need to make some
> assumptions about what kind of variables the game would keep track of.
This is something more complicated. What you'd want to do is to not do
it until needed. You could use a namespace to specify extra computer
game specific details in the core rules. The pen-and-paper rules would
ignore them, the computer game could read them.
Once you've done it once, though other games don't need to use the
same format, it's probably easier if they do. It should be possible to
work out a reasonably generic way of doing it, but not worth doing
until you're actually building the CRPG.
As games get more complex and 'complete', so you add to the rules
encapsulated in the XML. The more modular and consistent the game
system, the easier this should be to do.
--
Be seeing you, http://www.bifrost.demon.co.uk/
Sam. jabber: samuel.penn@xxxxxxxxxx
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