Updated / New Character Sheets

[tmedwards]

You are more than welcome to store it in the GCA Repository, that's what it's there for after all. Register for an account and then upload away.

[tmedwards]

GArrow, did you ever find someplace to store your sheet?

[GArrow]

Originally Posted by tmedwards

GArrow, did you ever find someplace to store your sheet?

I plan to upload it to the repository after I finish making some tweaks.

[Armin]

Originally Posted by GArrow

I plan to upload it to the repository after I finish making some tweaks.

I'm looking forward to seeing it. I don't have the time I'd like for updating the sheets, and am quite interested to see what you've done.

Armin

[GArrow]

Originally Posted by Armin

I'm looking forward to seeing it. I don't have the time I'd like for updating the sheets, and am quite interested to see what you've done.

Armin

I've uploaded it to the GCA Repository as 'Improved Character Sheet' (tag: character).

From the player's point of view, there are various improvements, trade-offs and minor layout changes -- some of which remain iffy.

In terms of implementation, essentially everything has been re-written or at least re-touched.

The key pieces of code are:

• FontMetrics class - Capture, clone, modify & pass fonts as arguments
• Table class - Utility to make tables easier (or at least briefer)
• LineRenderer class - Numerous routines to render/scale text line-by-line. (This evolved quite a bit over time, so parts of it are already obsolete and in poor form.)

There are also numerous other classes used to wrap weapons and equipment. These are good, but could be improved.

Finally, lots of utility functions to reduce redundancy. For example, options can be specified on just one line with:

• OHeader
• OFont
• OColor
• OText
• OYesNo

While incomplete/inconsistent, most sections of the sheet take arguments to indicate where they should be located. A future step would be to provide options to render the sections in any order or location a user wants.

[tmedwards]

GArrow,

The GetStat() and GetStatAttr() functions (@lines: 902 & 908) in your impcharsheet.gcs are flawed. Since object handling in VBScript is something of a bolt on, you can't easily return multiple types from a function, since Objects require the special set LVALUE = RVALUE syntax, while everything else uses the standard assignment LVALUE = RVALUE syntax. This is a problem when you have a return type that can be either a standard Variant or an Object and you don't know in advance what that type will be, so you can chose the appropriate assignment syntax. Essentially, it's a chicken and the egg problem. The way they are coded in the copy of the sheet that I retrieved from the repository, they fail fatally under normal usage.

Since you only call GetStat() from GetStatAttr(), my advice would be to modify them both as follows. I've included two functionally equivalent variations, both of which require no other changes to the sheet, for your perusal.

Version A: GetStatByRef as a Subroutine

sub GetStatByRef (byref stat, name)
  dim index : index = char.ItemPositionByNameAndExt(name, Stats)
  if index > 0 then set stat = char.Items(index)
end sub

function GetStatAttr (name, attr)
  GetStatAttr = ""
  dim stat : GetStatByRef stat, name
  if IsObject(stat) then GetStatAttr = stat.TagItem(attr)
end function

Version B:GetStatByRef as a Function

function GetStatByRef (byref stat, name)
  GetStatByRef = false
  dim index : index = char.ItemPositionByNameAndExt(name, Stats)
  if index > 0 then
    set stat = char.Items(index)
    GetStatByRef = true
  end if
end function

function GetStatAttr (name, attr)
  GetStatAttr = ""
  dim stat
  if GetStatByRef(stat, name) then GetStatAttr = stat.TagItem(attr)
end function

Cheers!

[tmedwards]

I suppose I should point out that the flaw noted in my previous post was found by testing impcharsheet.gcs with 4e characters; 3e characters don't seem to trigger the flaw. Further inspection reveals that it's missing a sizable portion of 4e code, so I should probably reserve further comment on 4e-related issues until you've actually completed the 4e code portions.

Regardless of it's current 4e status, it does seem to be a very nice sheet. Kudos. :)

[GArrow]

Originally Posted by tmedwards

I suppose I should point out that the flaw noted in my previous post was found by testing impcharsheet.gcs with 4e characters; 3e characters don't seem to trigger the flaw. Further inspection reveals that it's missing a sizable portion of 4e code, so I should probably reserve further comment on 4e-related issues until you've actually completed the 4e code portions.

Regardless of it's current 4e status, it does seem to be a very nice sheet. Kudos. :)

Thanks. I think I actually found & fixed that problem & several others about 10 minutes after I initially uploaded the sheet, leading to 3 or 4 additional uploads to fix different little issues. I am sure there are more in there still.

The sheet is (and probably should be described as) incomplete. It's sufficient for many cases, but does not address all cases in either 3e or 4e.

While I have made a few test chars, they don't exercise everything. Do you happen to have some that invoke all the conditionals and modifiers for every kind of field?

Also, for languages, I wrote the display based on the idea that the actual name of the language would be the nameext, which seems problematic. Is there a better convention? Perhaps using 'notes'? The obvious goal is to display "English 13" (or "English (Native) 13") instead of just "Language (Native) 13".

[tmedwards]

It would probably be a good idea to move further discussion to a new impcharsheet.gcs discussion thread, rather than cluttering the sheet announcement thread.

[GArrow]

I have uploaded a new version of the Improved Character Sheet to the GCA Repository.

New features/fixes:

• Fixed movement bug
• Support for 4e languages
• Unified handling for 3e languages
• New/reorganized options
• Internal code improvements

Both 3e and 4e languages are now expected to use the same representation. The Name of the skill/advantage is the name of the language; the NameExt should be 'Written', 'Spoken' or blank (for both). GCA will handle this automatically for 4e.