[Adonthell-devel] Re: charedit

[Kai Sterker]

On 6/29/06, Andrew Phillips <address@hidden> wrote:

I'm wondering ... any editor should be able to write data files that
are directly usable by the engine. Basically, there are/will be two
formats that are equivalent. A binary format and a ASCII format (which
needs a few tweaks and a functional parser yet).

Internally, all data is stored as key/value pairs, meaning that the
order in which stuff appears does not matter so much (although reading
the data will be fastest if things are saved in the order they will be
loaded). The structure of the data does matter though, since elements
can be nested.

Since we do not know exactly how the data for characters are loaded by
the engine, it is a little difficult to have any (prototype) editor
generate the data. OTOH, it should be quite easy to change or convert
data once we know the format.

Which makes me wonder: any progress on the character stuff, sonium?

Kai


> It occurred to me to prototype charedit as a perl/cgi script, possibly
> one that interacts with a web page and generates an XML doc for the
> character or creature once the user commits changes. Granted that
> given the choice of language and platform, the code has reusability
> approaching 0, but it might help to clarify concepts. Do you think
> it's worth doing?
>
> Also, I wondered if the character data will be stored in python
> scripts or XML docs. I'm trying to be forward-looking, in case the
> four editors ever need any common components, either UI or back-end.
>
> Andrew