Baby steps, baby steps...

[Pusher]

**Update**

After pulling much hair out over an xml error earlier, here's the newest version of my Shadowrun ruleset. This is getting fun now.

[NymTevlyn]

Not for a character sheet I would think. It looks nice. I need to learn XML someday myself so I can create a ruleset.

[Valarian]

Perhaps put the copyright notice at the bottom of the character sheet. There's usually one on sheets distributed with game books.

[NymTevlyn]

As I said elsewhere, I think the only issue with distributing character sheets is that you're not allowed to try and sell them. The copyright notice, as Valarian says, would cover almost all your bases.

[Griogre]

Not for a character sheet I would think. It looks nice. I need to learn XML someday myself so I can create a ruleset.
Just a comment. You don't need to learn XML to do rulesets. Very few applications, FG included, really use xml for anything other than holding data. The only things you need to know about XML are:

First, before I screw anyone up there are no spaces between the < and text. I wrote them in this message so they would show up.

Elements (referred to as tags in html) are case sensitive.
opening an element with < root > and closing < /Root > will not work. This *really* screws some people up.

Elements must be opened and closed.
If you open a "tag" you must close it with a "/" in front of the closing element. < xxxxx >< /xxxxx >

Data goes in between the elements (also see attributes below) < stuff >Data goes here< /stuff >

Empty elements with no data can be written like < Empty > < /Empty > or like < Empty/ >

Elements can have attributes that describe a feature or characteristic of the element:
< Good aling="Lawful and proud" /> Elements are one "word" with no spaces in this example you have an empty element Good having an attribute aling and aling = Lawful and proud . Attributes are are strings and as the example shows can have spaces and are enclosed by quotes

That is pretty much all the xml you need.

[NymTevlyn]

I think I would need to learn XML to figure out how to assign a die to an ability score and be able to drag it from the sheet to roll.

Strength d20
Dexterity d8

And so on...

[Griogre]

Not really, you need to understand how FG scripting works. This is the trick. Not xml. If you have any Basic or C then lua should not be really difficult. What is work is learning what FG's functions do, how they call each other what objects and varibles they need and pass. I was just trying to make the point that xml something you don't really need to know to do this.

[Dachannien]

Agreed. There's really not much "substance" to XML. It follows the simple rules that Griogre specified above. Every application that makes use of XML is different, whether it's the RSS feeds for your favorite blogs, the layout for your FG2 character sheet, or whatever else. The challenge isn't knowing how XML works - if you know anything about HTML, you pretty much already know how XML works, because HTML is sort of like a subset of XML - it's knowing what features your particular application has put into their XML schema.

What I mean by that is, take HTML for instance. You start a document with an &lt;html&gt; tag, and you have to close that tag with &lt;/html&gt; at the end. Inside that, the body of your web page is included inside &lt;body&gt; tags. You can then put content inside that, and if you want part of that in bold, you start it with a &lt;b&gt; tag.

In the same way, when you're doing a FG2 ruleset, you start a document with a &lt;root&gt; tag (okay, actually, there's that special XML tag before that, as seen in the various XML files). Inside that tag, there are certain other tags you can have, like &lt;includefile&gt;, &lt;windowclass&gt;, etc. Those tags form a sort of hierarchy, much like a web page does, where your HTML page contains a body, and that body can contain &lt;table&gt; tags, which can contain &lt;tr&gt; tags, which can contain &lt;td&gt; tags, which can contain other content.

In FG2, though, the tags you can have aren't the ones in HTML. They're specific to FG2. All the different XML tags that you can use are listed in the documentation. Those tags form the foundation for your FG2 ruleset, but you won't get a lot out of it without knowing how the scripting works. That's where the real work gets done :)

[Pusher]

Scripting, yep, that Lua lunacy is still spinning my head in circles.

[sloejack]

**Update**

After pulling much hair out over an xml error earlier, here's the newest version of my Shadowrun ruleset. This is getting fun now.

Seems clean which is always a good thing, If you keep your current layout, I think I would probably give less space to the description, or make it a scroller so that more gametime information could be made available on the first sheet. My personal take on GUI's is that you want any data that is frequently used/referenced available on the first click, everything else can be buried on other tabs/additional clicks.

I'm assuming that you won't be distributing this based on the book images you're using, I'm sure folks would be appriciative if you were willing to distibute a version without them.

[water_prophet]

Agreed. There's really not much "substance" to XML. It follows the simple rules that Griogre specified above. Every application that makes use of XML is different, whether it's the RSS feeds for your favorite blogs, the layout for your FG2 character sheet, or whatever else. The challenge isn't knowing how XML works - if you know anything about HTML, you pretty much already know how XML works, because HTML is sort of like a subset of XML - it's knowing what features your particular application has put into their XML schema.

What I mean by that is, take HTML for instance. You start a document with an &lt;html&gt; tag, and you have to close that tag with &lt;/html&gt; at the end. Inside that, the body of your web page is included inside &lt;body&gt; tags. You can then put content inside that, and if you want part of that in bold, you start it with a &lt;b&gt; tag.

In the same way, when you're doing a FG2 ruleset, you start a document with a &lt;root&gt; tag (okay, actually, there's that special XML tag before that, as seen in the various XML files). Inside that tag, there are certain other tags you can have, like &lt;includefile&gt;, &lt;windowclass&gt;, etc. Those tags form a sort of hierarchy, much like a web page does, where your HTML page contains a body, and that body can contain &lt;table&gt; tags, which can contain &lt;tr&gt; tags, which can contain &lt;td&gt; tags, which can contain other content.

In FG2, though, the tags you can have aren't the ones in HTML. They're specific to FG2. All the different XML tags that you can use are listed in the documentation. Those tags form the foundation for your FG2 ruleset, but you won't get a lot out of it without knowing how the scripting works. That's where the real work gets done :)

How would one go about coding a rule set to be able to take "successes" from dice rolls?

I'll explain this in detail (White Wolf system):
You roll 3d10. Instead of adding the results, you look to see how many of these three dice have a number of 8+. This is the number of "successes" you have achieved on that roll.

Example: I roll 5d10. I get 3, 4, 6, 8, 9. Because 8 and 9 are equal to 8 or above, I achieved 2 successes from that roll.

Ideas please?

[joshuha]

Its not too bad with just a little bit of LUA coding but essentiallylogic wise it would be like this:


Create a custom ruleset.
In the scripts folders is a file called chat_chat.lua
In there is a function called onDiceLanded() that triggers when dice hit the chat screen.
In there you would check to see if the drainfo type is "dice".
Put the results into a table by using the getDieList() function.
Loop through the table and find any number higher than your target number.
Count the success and output a message with the total number of successes.