Project: Par5e

[Irondrake]

I'd love to help test this out.

[Zeus]

@Irondrake - Great. I'll be uploading a development build to GitHub in the next few days. Keep posted.

[Willot]

Don't think you could by one, and why would you?

It looks impressive!!!!
I remeber when I was going to tafe and they had finally mothballed the PDP-11 for a unix box. Some minsters came for a visit and the did the tour. Of course they had the PDP-11 all powered up in it's air conditioned room> All the little lights and tape drives whiring around and they hum of high voltage. They were VERY impressed. Of course they only thing ACCUALLY doing any work was the small suitcase sided unix box tucked in the corner!!

[Zeus]

Been making some steady progress, the parser engine is coming along nicely and seems to be holding up against the current 5E playtesting material, so far I have the following content supported:

- Adventuring Gear, Armor, Magic Items and Weapons (Library and Items)
- Backgrounds (Library)
- Maneuvers (Library)
- NPCs (Library and Personalities)
- Skills (Library)
- Spells (Library)

I'll be starting work on Story, Encounters, Images and Tokens over this weekend and will look to complete Classes and Races too before taking on the reference text. I have no doubt Wizards will change the formats of the content between now and release but so far I am happy the engine seems to cope well enough.

Also prototyped a quick front-end GUI whilst I take a break from engine coding. This one is again written in Perl using wxPerl (derived from the wxWidgets library). The screenshots are all OSX flavoured windows (as thats what I am developing on) but wxPerl is available (as is wxWidgets) on Windows and Linux so hopefully (fingers crossed) the GUI will run on all three platforms using native window APIs.

Configuration tab (WiP):


Console tab (again WiP):

[S Ferguson]

This I definitely want to test drive. Just like a well-tuned car, it sounds sleek and of high performance.

[Irondrake]

This is looking better and better!

[Zeus]

Hey All, another update. I'm continuing to make good progress. Fell a bit behind as I decided a graphical interface would be better for a day one release but I am back on track and adding more functionality to the engine and 5E module library. I should be in a position to release an alpha later this week - keep you all posted.

v0.2

• Added a functional GUI
• Updated the PAR5E engine to make better use of multi-threading - GUI uses up to 2 threads whilst Parsing can use 4 or more if CPU resources are available
• Added support for Win32 file paths
• Added support for Perl 5-17.8 with threads
• Updated library module console output methods to use windows messaging
• Lots of bug fixes

Its is a simple interface however aside from a couple of differences I am quite pleased with the parity of the user interface between OS X and Win32 flavours (functionality on both platforms is equal) - not sure about Linux yet as I haven't had a chance to test it but hopefully GTK AUI will look similar. Some screen shot comparisons.



I am also investigating available Perl wrappers for Win32, OSX and Linux. I figured it maybe easier for the average user who is not Perl literate to use PAR5E if I provide native .exe, .app and Elf-32 binaries. As it stands PAR5E is simple enough to execute (single script command from the command line) however its a pain to get installed as it requires many module packages to be installed prior to execution, here's a sample of some of the modules required:

threads
threads::shared
Wx
XML::Writer
Carp
Encode:etect:etector
Text::Unidecode
XML::Tidy
File::Copy
Archive::Zip

I still plan to release the source Perl scripts for community developers to exploit particularly the bundled 5E ruleset library Perl module. The latter can be copied and tweaked to support other RPG game system data and FGII rulesets. I will be providing detailed user and developer documentation and for the latter have also taken care to add reasonable comments in the scripts themselves.

[Irondrake]

Outstanding, I can't wait to give this a go. Do the parsed 5E spells and other items work correctly with the 3.5e ruleset? Or would it be better to change to 4E?

[Zeus]

Outstanding, I can't wait to give this a go. Do the parsed 5E spells and other items work correctly with the 3.5e ruleset? Or would it be better to change to 4E?

The modules PAR5E produces with the 5E lib uses standard FGII Library reference index tags so in theory (not tested yet) the modules will display their main content indexes in either 3.5E or 4E, however the specific useable content will unlikely work in 3.5E or 4E as the data is tagged with new windowclasses (yet to be developed) in mind.

In other words, 5E modules will require a 5E ruleset. I am collaborating dev efforts with JPG, hoping to begin towards the end of this week. Watch this space.

[Irondrake]

I'll keep my eye out!