Hello,
I am playing with the idea of creating an online character creation program which would (eventually, if it was accepted by ICE) hosted on an ice subdomain.
I am looking at the following:
Objective:
Create a character creation program online that allows you to create a character and save it online, level it up online and allow you to print it out (possibly to a PDF which you can save and/or print at your own convenience).
It would be written with Apache, Mysql, Php in mind as that is what I have to work with and this has produced some wonderful prpograms that I am happy with so I would use those same mechanisms to create this.
I have a few questions that I would like peoples opinions on:
What would you like to see as "Stage One"?
- A blank character sheet that you could save and "undo" that as only fields that you can edit yourself?
Benefits: allows you to create Racial & Profession Templates and Training Packages without administrator modifications;
Drawbacks: have to manually enter details and keep track of expenditure such as ranks spent, DP's remaining, etc with possibility of creating errors.
The following would also apply (to make it easier for me to write, basically - others could rewrite the code later if you want):
RESTRICTIONS: Only one character Save per level. Going back to level one would give you a warnign that all other levels will be erased and no other Levels would remain (creating a Level ten character and then realising you made a mistake and need to modify level 1 will auto erase levels 2-10).
- A complete character generator as per HARP Core allowing to auto calculate benefits and penalties for race, professions, talents and training packages without the option to add your own:
Benefits: Easy to use the basic HARP and good for new players
Drawbacks: fails to make use of other books and rules. Hard to make adjustments if you want to include house rules for adolescence skills, etc...
- a complete character gerator including all existing harp and cyradon books
Benefits: looks better and more efficient
Drawbacks: locks in a preset rule system. Cant be made GPL etc due to ICE IP, hard to modify as it requires someone to agree to the ICE IP to access to the source to make changes. Any errors have to be corrected by the programmers...
Currently I am going with option 1.
It will be:
* easier to program
* easy for others to make changes
* code can be GPL'ed as ICE data would be in the SQL data tables, not in the code!
* I will allow an checkbox for Favored Categories for calculating DP's.
* Would try to allow manual Skills additions for Spells, other Skills, house skills, etc. (Only way I can see it working really!)
For the Printing option., I would try to use a PDF option. I have seen other programs do this and they dont have special code so I might try to scavenge their code to see how they did it...
Opinions people?
Can you see ways to improve this?