Draft GDF of Low Tech armor sets underway
 

EDIT May 31, 2011:
The combined Low Tech file, including armor, weapons, and misc:
http://www.motoslave.net/gcarepo/view.php?pkgid=94

My Big List of Armor file is up here:
http://www.motoslave.net/gcarepo/view.php?pkgid=74
Eric's Smart Location-Generating Armor File is up here:
http://www.motoslave.net/gcarepo/view.php?pkgid=75



I've written a little perl script and some feeder files to generate armor according to the tables in Low Tech.

They currently do not get colorful location-specific names (no haubergons, no pauldrons) nor respect the guidelines about what locations would be plausibly covered by which type of material.

Instead, it generates one item per combination of hit location (from p 102) and material (from pp 111-112). This means that there is a separate item listed for Arms and for shoulders and for upper arms and for elbows and for lower arms. A veritable wealth of procedurally generated options and I TOTALLY understand why SJG didn't print these in the book. Ye frickin gods. 646 individual items of equipment, not counting the helmet variations and whatnot.


So yes, you too can have "Cane (Groin)" or "Mail, Fine (Elbows)". I am open to suggestions on better ways to name these, but I don't think there's much we can do before we start splitting away from the tables.

They are being put into groups to help people filter through the crapton of options.


EDIT: Aaaaand I meant to post this in the GCA forum. Um. Yeah.

So next time a mod comes by, this can probably be relocated. :/

Re: Draft GDF of Low Tech armor sets underway
 

I havent really looked into it yet, but wouldnt it be easier to implemnt this in GCA the way it was published, as raw materials and a set of modifiers to account for hitlocations and other stuff?

Re: Draft GDF of Low Tech armor sets underway
 

You start having to manually rename every item to avoid duplication (and a rather confusing equipment list!)

As far as I know, also, the field that tells GCA which hit location your armor is for doesn't take modifiers at the moment, and the entire armor/DR/hitlocation system is being rewritten so I don't expect a minor patch for that before that major patch.

Long story short - this is a field-expedient solution.

Re: Draft GDF of Low Tech armor sets underway
 

To bad, seemed like a nice and elegant solution, the renaming Problem could be circumvented with the _new_item approach, that also lets one fill the location field via a dialog. But it seems like we have to wait for Armin to implement some changes before Low Tech armor will work nicely.

Re: Draft GDF of Low Tech armor sets underway
 

I'm curious, does that include Front and Back versions of all of the pieces? I'm working on my own variation, and still need to implement Front/Back, which will drastically increase the number of variations (Front Right Upper Arm anyone?).

I've actually been toying with an approach like that, where you'd fill in check-boxes to select which locations are covered. No modifiers necessary, all the information will be filled in by a #ChoiceList(), just like the _New Items. I've got it working, I think, but need to do a little more testing and then take my "generic" armor I've been testing with and make copies of it for each of the armor types presented in Low-Tech. The only thing that GCA can't currently do is handle all the hit locations; currently hit locations are hard-coded into GCA, so there's no way to add more hit locations for armor coverage (such as Shins or Upper Arms)

Still, a complete list isn't necessarily a bad approach either. The final version of the data file may have both, provided Bruno keeps going with the individual pieces.

Re: Draft GDF of Low Tech armor sets underway
 

Heck, GCA doesn't handle "front" or "back" very gracefully at the moment either.

And no, I hadn't thought of the Front/Back because it wasn't on the two big tables :D

I can modify my little perl script to spit those out too, though. A whopping 1938 different versions of ... stuff... if we do that. Since it's not on the two big tables, it might be an idea to make it a modifier? I don't mind spitting it out, I'm just wondering about information overload for folks.

I've got the shields and helmets by the way - the shields is just a straight dump of the table into GCA format with some notes, the helmets are, again, procedurally generated so you can totally have a plate coif or a straw greathelm if your GM doesn't care.

Cloth, Padded incidentally corresponds neatly to that padding mentioned in all the helmet entries, for folks who want padding.

It's up on the Repository, current version does NOT include Front/Back variations:
http://www.motoslave.net/gcarepo/view.php?pkgid=74

Re: Draft GDF of Low Tech armor sets underway
 

Which is why we decided not to do this in Low-Tech. We would have had to cut a lot of other stuff to make room for armour tables.

Re: Draft GDF of Low Tech armor sets underway
 

Not everything needs a Front/Back variant, though. Face/Skull are already basically a Front/Back for the head. Back of the Face just doesn't make much sense :-)

Kind of. The "official" notation is to append a F or B to the armor DR (e.g. DR: 6F), and currently you can't append text to DR using a modifier.

I'll note that in my "everything" version of the armor I can't append the F/B to the DR anyway. GCA doesn't currently allow you to assign separate DR to individual hit locations, so if I were to allow it to assign Front/Back it would assign it to the entire piece of armor, not just select locations. Since the way I'm designing it is to allow you to select multiple hit locations assigning Front/Back to all hit locations at once doesn't make much sense.

Proper naming conventions combined with good grouping into equipment categories can help eliminate some of the overload.

:-)
I honestly hadn't looked into the helmets yet. Haven't really had much time to read it over, let alone code anything. I really should be working on a lab or two for school right now, but I'm being a little lazy at the moment...

I'm getting some mismatched parens errors on some of the shields. Check your logging window; looks like the skillused() tag for them is not including a closing parenthesis.

Re: Draft GDF of Low Tech armor sets underway
 

The Coif actually gives DR to location 5 from the back. Which is a better way of saying it: "From the back" not "on the back".

Thanks for pointing this out, it's been corrected, and the Mycenean shield has a skill now. Although I'm not sure what you'd do with it since you can't bash or rush with it.

There's also a big error in some costs due to a stupid search/replace on my part. I've corrected that as well and it's all going up on the repository right now.

Re: Draft GDF of Low Tech armor sets underway
 

I've just uploaded the preliminary version of my Low Tech Armor w/Location Selection to the GCA File Repository.

http://www.motoslave.net/gcarepo/view.php?pkgid=75