Draft GDF of Low Tech armor sets underway

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by hal

Why not treat any armor location for the sub-categories of arms/legs as being armor for the arms/legs locations - but put in the notes section: "Protects the leg on a 5 or 6 on d6" etc?

That could lead to some hit locations having huge numbers of DR values applied. Front and back, upper and lower, shoulder, knee, etc. It would be at least as "wrong" as having no DR for the Arms or Legs with these armors.

What really needs to happen is for GCA to be modified to handle the new hit locations, or better yet for it to have some way of modifying the hit locations both with data files and within the program (e.g. so a creature with Wings can have that hit location listed).

[hal]

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

That could lead to some hit locations having huge numbers of DR values applied. Front and back, upper and lower, shoulder, knee, etc. It would be at least as "wrong" as having no DR for the Arms or Legs with these armors.

What really needs to happen is for GCA to be modified to handle the new hit locations, or better yet for it to have some way of modifying the hit locations both with data files and within the program (e.g. so a creature with Wings can have that hit location listed).

I'm guessing that we're talking about a serious bit of rewriting and designing of the primary program here - something that might qualify as a major revision change that will not be profitable unless buyers shell out another fee for the program.

By the by Eric? I wish I'd know you were living where you do. I recently was out your way picking up replacement parts for my Eureka tent, and eating at the nearby Sonic. Would have stopped by just to say hi if nothing else ;)

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by hal

I'm guessing that we're talking about a serious bit of rewriting and designing of the primary program here - something that might qualify as a major revision change that will not be profitable unless buyers shell out another fee for the program.

Me thinks you're exaggeration just a bit. Supporting the new hit locations won't be that difficult at all. Changing the program to allow creating new hit locations to be created in data files would certainly be a significant change which will take Armin some time, but it's not like we're talking about a complete program rewrite here or anything.

Originally Posted by hal

By the by Eric? I wish I'd know you were living where you do. I recently was out your way picking up replacement parts for my Eureka tent, and eating at the nearby Sonic. Would have stopped by just to say hi if nothing else ;)

Hee, would have been cool. If you ever come back through let me know. One of these years I need to make it out to the West Coast just so I can meet Armin face to face...

[Bruno]

Heh, I'm just over the border in Canada. We've got our US office in Ogdensburg NY of all place.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Heh, I'm just over the border in Canada. We've got our US office in Ogdensburg NY of all place.

Yeah, 'course that's a 4 hour drive North of where I live. I know the 'burg well though; my grandparents live up there, and I used to go up there for years. I have some vivid memories of a wonderful dinosaur park on the Canadian side where they had life sized statues which they actually encouraged people to interact with. For the life of me I don't remember what the name of the place was though.

[Bruno]

On the subject of Low Tech GDFs, has anyone started work on the weapons yet? If not, let me know and I should be able to get 'em going this week.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by Bruno

On the subject of Low Tech GDFs, has anyone started work on the weapons yet? If not, let me know and I should be able to get 'em going this week.

Unfortunately, I haven't touched 'em.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

Unfortunately, I haven't touched 'em.

I started messing around with the basic melee weapons anyways (bored bored bored), and I think I'll have something to at least test Real Soon Now if it stays quiet here. I'm missing page numbers, the description() only has the notes from the first weapon mode at the moment, and the modes are named rather stupidly (swing, swing 2, etc) but presuming I haven't made a major error that's all that needs more work.

Three cheers for perl, three cheers for tabular data.

Boooooo for items that aren't in tables.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Three cheers for perl, three cheers for tabular data.

Boooooo for items that aren't in tables.

Yeah, that was one of the reasons I hadn't touched it. With the previous books I was able to take the tabular data from the books and, without too much trouble, import it into a spreadsheet where I could easily convert it to GDF format. It took relatively little time for me to convert all the weapons from Ultra-Tech, High-Tech, and it's supplements. It took me considerably longer to do Martial Arts because of the number of weapons which needed special attention. From what I could see, Low-Tech was more like Martial Arts than High/Ultra-Tech in this regard.

[Bruno]

I've got page numbers in.

There's enough pages that writing a script complicated enough to handle special cases was worth it, although it's specialized for melee weapons.

It takes in a tab-separated table (cut and pasted from excel where I've added the page number column >.>) and spits out tables.

Just gotta figure out what I need to rewrite to handle the descriptions and then it's on to ranged weapons.

Parsing out regular items should actually be possible - I did it with the Dungeon Fantasy 1 equipment. It'll just involve lots of regular expression and checking each item which is just ugh.