Treasure Generator

[Jeminai]

Any one thought about programming a treasure generator based on DF 8?

[Kuroshima]

Originally Posted by Jeminai

Any one thought about programming a treasure generator based on DF 8?

Though? hell yes. The main problem is that doing so would replicate very large parts of DF8. I'm pretty sure that SJG would frown at this.

[ericbsmith]

Moved to an appropriate forum.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Jeminai

Any one thought about programming a treasure generator based on DF 8?

More than thought about. As I was working on the book, I cobbled together a database with, essentially, the contents of DF8 and queries to generate most permutations of the various tables of items and embellishments. It's the wrong approach, really, and although it formed the core of the work I did for the upcoming DF: Loadouts, it's not something which will ever see the light of day, both because it's not even remotely ready and for the obvious legal reasons.

[aesir23]

Perhaps it's something that could be done officially and charged for?

[Bruno]

I've got the crude beginnings of same, but it suffers from the many problems of:

• Full of copyright material that I don't have permission to distribute and goes WAY beyond Fair Use sampling
• Never was intended for public consumption so is written in Perl with a "User interface" that is probably hostile to most computer users
• Never was intended to produce complete item stats, just speed up my "rolling on tables and flipping pages" process, so the cockeyed database I put together is NOT expandable in the right directions.
• The book was NEVER designed for a computer to automate so there's a whole bunch of random crap thrown together on the same table - base items, directions to roll X times on the same or a different table, enhancements to the existing item rather than flat modifiers, etc etc etc. This makes it a Big Pain In The Ass from a programming point of view. An idiot die roll/table-lookup isn't enough, it has to examine the result, perform some conditional operations, and probably recurse onto three or four more tables. Which means a more complicated and by definition more buggy program.

[Kazander]

Wouldn't that be nice?

It's an ideal product for it, really. Lots of tables.

A pain to generate treasure by hand with all those tables, really. Nice resource, but tedious to use.

So, I also did up something for myself, but mine is just an Excel Spreadsheet. It works at about 95% of what is in the book. I'm not a professional programmer by any means, and trying to implement some of the conditions in there made my brain go <thp!!>. Good enough for most of what I want, but again no one can distribute any of this stuff because it really is 100% of the contents of the book and you'd get slapped down by SJ Games (rightfully).

If it were done officially, I would pay for it again. Not that I really think there is any chance of that happening. SJ Games just doesn't seem to have resources for gaming aids.

[Jeminai]

Wasn't GCA started by someone outside of SJ Games?

[Bruno]

Incidentally that last point isn't a criticism of the book. It's perfectly good for humans, the intended market. It's just our robot overlords who would be annoyed by it :D

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Kazander

Wouldn't that be nice?

Oh, definitely. The application I see for it would be a random hoard generator. Tell it "I need a batch of treasure worth $x" and have it come back with a batch of items.