File format (native)

[Frostlee]

At first let me say your project is really great!
I'm looking forward the 0.1 release because i think this program will be gamer's best friend!
(sorry for any grammar mistake, i'm not english speaking! )
I'm also willing to help a bit, but i don't have much spare time, so i think i'll just test stuff when ready and post comment or suggestion.
Actually i'm between the techies and the non-techies, able to understand instructions how to make a beta release run (both in win on *nix system), but not great at put my hands in someone else code.
Now, let's go back intopic:
i have read your document on the wiki about the "native" file formats for WarFoundry and i have few suggestion for you:
Using XML+ZIP is a great idea for maxium portability, but maybe allowing different compression? *.tar.gz is great and "put this file there" is somoething even non-tech people can do, whatever extension the file has!
the Game System is really poor in information. at least i think you should add a (optional!) version attribute for the file file, and maybe also a (optional) version attribute for the game system (someone said WH editions? )
also i think that categorie's min and max percentage should be made optional, and (optional) min and max units (or whatever you put in every category) should be made avaliable. this in to allow mixed sitatuon like: no more than 5 units in cat5 and at least 2 units in cat2; or between 4 and 10 units in cat4 but less than 50% of total points; and so on...
otherwise the min and max can be specified in a separate attribute, allowing different "mission" to be selected (like WH40k...) and every mission has it's own compulsory category...
also interesting would be adding something like rollcal's restrictions: one unit allowed in cat2 every 2 unit in cat6, but this maybe could be done in race file and make the file quite complicated. and i don't know any game which required this!
last optional attribute i think you need is a min and max (and maybe a default) value for the stats, and a boolen allowing stas to get a "NULL" value (which could be different from zero!).
sorry for the very long post, and sorry if i i said something really stupid!
hope this could help you a bit!

[IBBoard]

Welcome to the forums, and thanks for the input. It's good that we've got a couple of non-techies on-board who can help make it more accessible to the wider world

Going through your points:

• Alternate compression shouldn't be a problem (just create a new file loader) but I stuck with Zip because it is something that is more readily visible to Windows users. I'd imagine a lot of people who have WinZip or WinRar won't necessarily know what a .tar.gz is and might get confused, even if their app can create it.
• Keeping the file name as ".zip" or whatever may work, but if people recognise it and expect to have to decompress it somewhere. It's easier to get them to "put this file there" if they don't know they can do other things with the file!
• Version numbers may be useful and should be easy to add (they should probably be in all files really), but I'd be inclined to avoid game system version numbers. If people want WH6 and WH7 then they can make two different game systems with two different IDs and two slightly different names, since there isn't guaranteed compatibility.
• Percentages on categories should be optional and default to min 0% and max 100%
• Min and max units in a category is quite a complex thing and so was going to be left for the "Requirements" code. 40K has minimums and maximums, where as Warhammer has min on Core, max on others and changes with points values, where as other game systems probably have nothing. That is further complicated by the fact that some units don't count towards those limits. If we put it as a Requirement instead then it can use the ExtraData tags to pull details it needs like those and you can have a "Warhammer 7th Edition Validator" plugin.
• Similarly, missions are probably a validator thing since anything else gets lots of game system-specific code in to the core of your API.
• Unit requirements like you mention are already planned for WarFoundry 0.2, although Rollcall didn't do it on a per-category basis, it was always unit to unit
• Stats are purposefully just plain strings to support a variety of game systems. Some Warhammer stats use #D6, which Rollcall had a hack to support. Some other Warhammer stats are #D6+X, which Rollcall had a second hack to support. Some other game systems (Starship Troopers, IIRC) has stats that are D20+D6+3, which would require one hell of a hack to accommodate. Instead I went for plain strings.

Hopefully that answers your questions. If anyone has any comments or suggestions on any of those points then please post them. Those were my ideas and plans, but I'm sure some things could be done better.

[Frostlee]

yeah, thank for your answer!
using the list make everything more clear!

[Frostlee]

hi, i'm here again, haunting the forum in my spare time.
i was very happy when i read about the image supporting of warfoundry for the badge and the banner for the army, so i decided to "resurrect" thi dead topic to discuss about.

here my ideas (just suggestion, maybe you or someone else has better)

i think that the GUI should have a "default image missing" sort of thing: if any image is missing just show something like a big "?" could be enough. or eve better, don't show nothig at all. mabye this could be just handling some "ImageMissingException".

the game system file. well, may sound strange but i think that i hase images... but i think that general icons could be carried by the game system file. my first idea was the "category symbol", but others may be added as well.

the race file. well, i think that this file should carry to kind of images. the first set should be optional and is used to replace the army fle icons with cusmoms one, of course that belongs to the race.
the second set (optional as well if you have the "default image missing" thing) should be the image for everything the rest definited by the race file. units, but also equipment as well (yeah, hard but sounds fantastic to me!) colud have their own image.

the army file. at this point you may already guess my ideas: two set of image as well, the first one, optional, to override the race image (yhea, instead of the image of a space marine, put your own photo of the squad!) and the second to create banner or badge for the squads and for the army.

well. as usual a very long post written in very bad english, but i think you wll understand me!
nothing seems too much difficult, but of course everything is optional enough to be posticipated until warfoundry 0.3 at last!

[IBBoard]

Category images (e.g. the 40K HQ/Elite/Troops etc) were already on my list of "ideas to implement at some point". It was part of the reason for the move to zipped files - you can then easily bundle additional files in there as well The idea would be that the UI would ask the race for images, which would fall back to the game system if there weren't race specific overrides, which would in turn fall back to some default (possibly blank) images.

I had considered unit type icons as well to support Kyerdog's cool mock-up, but I hadn't thought of equipment images. I guess it might be useful/pretty in some places and it shouldn't be too hard to implement once we've got the rest of it in

Custom army overrides would also be interesting for some people, but as you said it's definitely an "optional" feature

If you come up with any more ideas then feel free to post them as tickets on the dev site as well. You'll need to be registered there as well as here, but any registered member can create tickets. Just try to break things down sensibly so that we don't have big "do lots of stuff" tickets

[Frostlee]

well, i'm not such good programmer to actaually submit tikets, i'd rather prefer share my thoughs and let you decide if they are good ideas and could be submitted as tikets or are just foolish...

[IBBoard]

Tickets don't need to be from programmers - bug tickets are generally user tickets and feature tickets can come from anyone

At the end of the day, if there's a feature that you think an army creation app should have then it's probably a sensible feature (even if it isn't a priority) and we should think about how to include it.

[IBBoard]

I'll dump this here, since it is the most relevant topic based on title

I've just finished updating the WarFoundry File Format explanation document, and the only section remaining should be the army (what you save, not the race description).

The explanation page is aimed at people making files and tries to explain what each tag and attribute is used for. I tried to make the names sensible anyway, but some didn't necessarily make sense without knowing what the app was doing. Hopefully they'll help people take advantage of some of the features of the files.

If anything doesn't make sense then please clarify it (if you've got the permissions) or give me a shout.