It all looks so......

Yay familiars

Can I see some references?

A work in progress. I think they are almost finished. The original FR backgrounds use a different format which will take some adjusting, but Arcane Power, PHB3, and Psionic Power all look to be working correctly.

The agonizing grind........

Now that 2.0 is in public testing I switched back to looking at the parser. There have been a number of posts about random pieces of compendium data which do not scrape correctly. I decided to investigate these by attempting to scrape every published book and seeing what breaks and why.

Since the compendium feature is a new component of the parser, I never went back and ran serious testing against all the modules I had completed. In fact I've only been using it on material published after Divine Power. Any publication that predates that I parsed using either a purchased pdf or OCR from my purchased printed copy. This means several of the "big" books (PHB, MM, etc) never got the full testing.

That's not say I ran no testing on them, but I typically ran a sampling, because extracting and processing something like the entire Adventurer's vault is a pain. It's even more of a pain when your extraction process is still a bit suspect and you know you're going to have to do it more than once.

Anyhow, I decided to bite the bullet and go through each and every book and note what's broken, what I can fix, and what's beyond my control. I've been going in alphabetical order (for lack of a better system) and I am currently on the Player's Handbook and Player's Handbook 2. Both had issues with certain rituals which I think are fixed. I still need to re-scrape/parse them both and make sure the issue is taken care of and I didn't break anything else along the way.

I'm hopeful that I'll be able to complete the process this week.

3.0.0

I've packaged it up and uploaded it to FUM, once it shows up as available for download I'll post a link to it. You should pretty much forget everything you knew about the existing parser UI, the 3.0.0 change is at least as significant as the 2.0.0 change.

Oh and it added support for arcane power stuff. Linked powers and arcane power specific items (like familiars) won't be live until the next ruleset update.

Version History:

3.0.0

* Arcane Power support. Familiars and other changes.
* Complete rewrite of the interface. Old files will still load and should save as
updated versions

General:
The tree uses graphics to indicate the type of input it will expect.
Optional items are indicated with the (Optional) tag
Clicking on an item will open the correct/window menu. These now use windows common controls

Context Menus:
Clear - Remove the data
Validate - Verify that all files/directories/values are specified
Process - This will parse the item and some top level items. The resulting XML is displayed in a simple XML browser for debugging.


Menus:
->File: Contains the file operations such as save/load/exit
->File->Save: This saves the current settings to a file.
->File->Load: This lodes the current settings from file.
->File->Exit: Ends the program

->Parse: Contains the parsing operations
->Parse->File Check: Verifies all the paths exist/all required information has been supplied
->Parse->Parse: Verifies all the paths exist/all required information has been supplied and then converts the raw data into FGII format.

Processing Results window:
This displays during a parse. It provides a wealth of information as to what the parser is doing and any errors it encounters. Some errors are not fatal (such as missing tokens) and the parse will complete. Fatal errors should be trapped and reported, at the very least you'll have a better idea what the parser was doing when it broke.


*************************************************
TOP LEVEL:
*************************************************
Name: This becomes both the file name of the module, and it's the name displayed in FGII
Thumbnail: This is the thumbnail to be displayed in the module
Category: The group this module appears in within the library.
Modestring: A unique internal identifier. This prevents the library/adventure objects for this module from conflicting with other modules.
Temporary Directory: The directory where the parser results are stored.
Output Format: Provides three options for output:
db.xml = Readable only by the host
common.xml = Readable by all, stored at the host. FGII Handles distribution. Slow.
client.xml = Readable by all, stored locally. Each user must have their own copy.
Output to Library: Determines if the module is displayed in the library. Normally it is only set to off for Adventure modules.
Module Directory: Determines where the final module is stored (see compression utility)

Compression Utility: The two options in this section take the place of the batch file.
Executable: Location of the compression exe (c:\program files\winRar\winrar.exe for example)
Flags: Any flags required for the compression for WinRAR use A -afzip -ep1
The resulting command is:
{executable} {flags} "{module directory}\{name}.mod" "{temporary directory}\*.*"


2.0.26

* Added the ability to parse map shortcuts (pins).

I've been here before it's all so.....

...Familiar!


So I finished up Arcane Power today.....it was a lot faster with PDFs.

There are a few gotcha powers/feats/etc (as always) but nothing too major. Familiars were the only required ruleset change and they are just a simple display class. Of course there was some parser work as well....

Things I hate about Arcane power:

Warlocks and their new stupid "Curse Stance" powers that require multiple new keywords.

The fact that every book comes with a new Warlock pact. I half expected Martial Power to have a warlock pact in it.

Summons which work different than the summons from PHB2 (i.e the wizard summons).

Dynamic Tags that escalate into other dynamic tags (Wyrm Form and Cloud of Flies)

WOTC's desire to create a seemingly endless array of Paragon paths.

Dancing Bolt because it grants the same action twice....once on a secondary target and once on a primary target.


And of course....

The lack of PDFs :(