Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Because I love color....

Redesigned skill challenge display class and a button that adds it to the Skill Challenge Tracker

8 comments:

DrZeuss said...

Nice. :)

Unknown said...

Beautiful. Especially the button thing, which I had been wondering why it wasn't already in there.

Thing is though, all us kids have our noses pressed up against the Tenian and Moon_Wizard candy store but we have no idea what time it opens! Any comments?

A bit more prosaically, can we get a revised parser/ruleset to be able to use this wonderful work of yours? Please.

J said...

Last I heard, moon_wizard is working on some big stuff so my changes have yet to be absorbed. Fortunately there is very little actual code behind these changes. They are mostly just moving fields around, changing fonts/frames. They are technically easy so they should integrate well.

I haven't even received a test copy of his work in a while, so my guess is any release would be at least two weeks out.

There really haven't been any significant parser changes that will function without a ruleset update (i.e. you could build catalogs but not display them...so what's the point?)

There have been some ease of use changes that involve parsing of story elements, but they aren't fully tested and my understanding is very few people use the parser to build adventures...most seem to prefer the FGII interface for story elements.

Unknown said...

I use the parser almost exclusively to build adventures! The SoW AP adventures. I have all but the last three good to go now.

J said...

Glad to hear it :)

The new version adds:

ZPB,ZPI, and ZPF (ZPF optionally takes an = and a string. i.e. ZPF=Frodo). They apply Bold, Italics and Frame (and FrameId if the equal is used) tags to the next paragraph. I use these for the "Setup" section which is full of bold text and frames.

ZFEATURE
Any paragraphs that follow this mark and contain a colon get a bold tag added between the start paragraph marker and after the colon. This makes formatting the "Features of the Area" section a lot easier.

DrZeuss said...

I too am reconsidering my use of the Parser when it comes to adventure modules. Right now I use it exclusively for rulebooks. I admit to liking the FG2 interface for inputing text and formatting story elements etc. However with my recent issue with the moduledb files for my H1 KoTS module I am beginning to think maybe their is wisdom in using the Parser for this type of module after all.

If you get 5 mins Tenian I'd be interested in your view.

http://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10473

Unknown said...

J, could I then do something like the following?

ZFEATURE
Perception check (DC 22):
ZPF
Two more kobolds appear to be hiding behind some crates.

Or do the ZP- tags not work "inside" the ZFEATURE?

Oh, and I would be very interested to hear what "big stuff" moon_wizard is working on!

J said...

I'm assuming the board ate all your paragraph tags, so I'll use brackets:

ZFEATURE
[p]
Perception check (DC 22):
[/p]
ZPF
[p]
Two more kobolds appear to be hiding behind some crates.
[/p]

Would probably work. I never tried to use ZFEATURE that way. The replacement actually works in 2 passes. ZFEATURE changes go first, and the ZP* changes work on the resulting changed text.

The other issue is ZFEATURE works on all the text following it. so if you had

ZFEATURE
[p]
Perception check (DC 22):
[/p]
ZPF
[p]
Two more kobolds appear to be hiding behind some crates.
[/p]
...bunch of text....
[p]The 14th crate on the left contains: a longsword, 2 cloth caps, and 17 halfling fingers.
[/p]
...text....

It would become:


[p][b]
Perception check (DC 22):[/b]
[/p]
ZPF
[p][frame]
Two more kobolds appear to be hiding behind some crates.
[/frame][/p]
...bunch of text....
[p][b]The 14th crate on the left contains:[/b] a longsword, 2 cloth caps, and 17 halfling fingers.
[/p]
...text....


That second block of bold text is probably not what is intended. I guess you could double check every entry for colons.