Thursday, October 19, 2006

ItemMaker updates

I've been slowly working on the Arcana Evolved Item Maker. Very slowly.

So far I have tests for 4 different item types, but 3 of those need some refactoring. My current goal is to finish one kind of item and get that working in a UI. I've decided that the first Item type I want to tackle are single use items.

At a minimum in order to get an app together that does single use items, I need:

  1. Tested and debugged basic single use types --DONE
  2. Tested and debugged basic spells --DONE
  3. Code to load spells from disk
  4. Code to save single use items
  5. Code to load single use items
  6. A UI that doesn't suck


Extra stuff that would be cool:

  1. The ability to print items you've made in nice stat blocks
  2. The ability to sort spells by level, basic type (damage, buff, etc), descriptor, level, and alphabetically
  3. The ability to specify multiple sorts
  4. Some automated way to add new spells
  5. Images

And of course, other item types.

Ultimately, I'd like my item maker to be better than the existing one.

Right now I have code that loads the spells from an XML file, but it's pretty brittle. If an entry in the spell data is missing or not in the right order it croaks.

I really have to watch myself. I'm trying, unsuccessfully, to keep things simple. YAGNI. So far I've made a SpellWriter, which writes out spell data in the appropriate XML format. I don't need it. I wrote it to play with more of the .NET XML classes. Oh well, maybe I'll be able to use it for something else later on.

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