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Originally Posted by BrollyFerret
no tm you were not harsh. I infact didn't know that about the GCA. I assumed that it was SJGames proprietary and a more recent codebase at that.
Still I think it might be better to start working on doing/supporting/funding an OSS version, perhaps one where companies can sell datasets for a small fee.
To me it seems like a logical next step in pdf online publishing. Adding software tools to enhance gameplay. Since so many games are similar in their character generation routines it figures that a decent bit of software could be devised and a standard be made for rpg mechanics material.
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PCGen has that as its goal, but it currently only supports D20 systems. It's open source, written in Java. It comes with datasets for the System Reference Document (SRD) and Revised SRD (basically, D&D 3.0 & 3.5), and a bunch of non-WOTC datasets (whose publishers agreed to make freely available). They're working on coding the 4th Ed. equivalent now, for use with the next release. Unfortunately, WOTC decided to stop licensing their own datasets, so the only legal way to get any other WOTC material into the program is to code it yourself (previously, you could buy the datasets from Code Monkey Publishing, although I seem to recall they were rather expensive).
If you thought GCA was slow, you ain't seen nothing! Takes almost 5 minutes just to open my D&D characters, and about 15 seconds to respond when I change tabs. This is on a 3.2 GHz P4 laptop with 1 GB RAM....
And believe me, it's
not a simple task to add support for a completely different system (e.g., GURPS)! There's a huge amount of code that would need to be modified.
Apologies for getting off-topic.