moneygen continues to be a problem

Though it looks like it's quite complete, moneygen has turned into a royal pain. I'm not seeing an obvious solution. Going to have to put it away for a bit and try coming back to it when my head is cleared. I'm going to try to not leave it too long, especially since the number of releases seems to affect freshmeat.net's vitality rating (not the fact that the project has been around for 3 years).

It'll probably sit the day before I come back to it. Happy Father's Day all!

Moneygen development continues

Moneygen is a little further along. I'm still working on fixing up a few problems, but the GUI is almost done.

Many of the other tools will be simpler. While moneygen isn't the most complicated program, it's presented a bit of a challenge.

I'm not completely satisfied with the GUI, but there's space for changes in subsequent versions. The important part is making sure it works as intended.

Next on the plate will be finishing a few of the smaller tools. Once that's done I'm going to write a small GUI front end to the converted tools and do an 0.85 release as a mid-point to 0.9. At 1.0 I'm going to try to pump out a Windows version.

Moneygen gets a new face, development continues...

It's not pretty yet, nor is it done, but this is a quick glimpse at the beginning of the old moneygen.tcl tool. As you can see it works -- sort of. Of course I still have to implement a continue rolling button, but you can see that it works much like the old script.

I've also been thinking that the website at: http://www.linux-games.ca/iceutils/index.html might get a facelift. But all in time. I'd like to add tk versions of most of the tools before release 0.9, but I might do a few minor releases under the 0.8 branch so tools are available as I continue to develop them.

I think that the largest challenge is going to be the map generator. I'm not sure if this is something that just gets exported to one big .png file or whether it shows on the screen. I think it shows on the screen, but I need to do both and that may take more time that I want to invest with everything going on... so it may not make it until a 1.0 release.

IceUtils v0.8 out (New GUI tool)

It's been awhile since I updated the web log. I intended to do it on a regular basis, life just happened and got in the way. The good news is that IceUtils 0.8 is now out! It adds a new Graphical tool called gnames.tcl.

Yes, I used TCL/Tk. I just haven't been able to spend time properly learning a programming language. I've used Tk before and figured I could probably figure things out. gnames.tcl is a combination of the mnames and fnames tools in a compact graphical user interface. You click on either the male or female radio button, then click the Get Name button. You can generate as many names as you want and switch between generating male or female names just by choosing the other radio button and clicking Get Name.

The plan now is to continue converting the tools to Tcl/Tk one by one and eventually tying them together. Tcl/Tk is a glue language. I've glued graphical tools together before, so this shouldn't be too difficult once the other tools are complete. I've already began converting the money generator.

Once the tools are all converted and the main menu created I'll consider a Windows port. Presently I don't have a Windows machine at home, I'm not really a Windows guy, but I have done Tcl/Tk programming on Windows before, so converting the tools will probably be fairly smooth.

Check out the new release on the Iceutils main page:
http://www.linux-games.ca/iceutils/index.html

or on Freshmeat:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/iceutils/

25th Anniversary at The Working Centre & plan

Yesterday was the celebration of 25 years in the Kitchener/Waterloo community for The Working Centre. Well over 500 people passed through the three Working Centre buildings on Queen Street South. Groups of people toured through The Working Centre's various project and community services areas including the new apartments at 66 Queen Street, the new Computer Recycling, job counseling, Recycled Cyces, the Queen Street Commons cafe, and a number of other interesting projects.

Needless to say it was a busy day. By the time I got home I'd spent 12 hours walking around. It's funny the kind of energy an event like this requires, it makes you appreciate politicians more. Speaking of which, I had the opportunity to meet Carl Zehr, Mayor of Kitchener. I've seen Mayor Zehr at various events before, but this was the first chance I got to speak with him, and he's a really down to earth guy. I understand why he's been reelected.

But this is a web log about Iceutils development and I've rambled off topic (my excuse for not getting anything done). The plan is to try to finish a basic prototype of the next utility for the suite this weekend. I'm going to skip the Drupal conference in Toronto. I've already had a huge week with KWLUG and the 25th Anniversary Celebration. In version 1 or 2 of the software I had a pretty good tool that eventually got dropped. Unfortunately I can't simply go back to that tool and use the code because it was written in TCL, not C. I could change things, but it would take me almost as much time as it would to recode the tool in C, and I think I could do a better job.

Where did that time go?

The past two days I've done zero coding on the project. On Monday I attended the Kitchener / Waterloo Linux User's Group (KWLUG), which meant I was at work from 9am to 9:30pm. When I got home I wasn't thinking about any coding. Yesterday I cleaned up my desktop machine and chilled.

Tonight I have laundry scheduled, but I should be able to get some coding in. Work might expect me to stay with the open house tomorrow, but I really have to get laundry done and only have a limited amount of time to do it on (laundry room closes at 9).

About the skills problem... a 3 dimensional array might be possible if I clumped the skills differently from how they're treated in RMC. Sadly, I still think it's just going to be on a case by case basis, but this seems like it would lead to future coding messes. The more simple I can make it, the more I can group the skills, the easier it will be for future versions to be adjusted.

A little early morning coding

I got up early this morning and managed to push the code to over 300 lines. Most of this is table arrays. In the end the actual code base will probably be pretty small. It's the tables no one really wants to do and figure out.

It made sense not to include certain tables. For example, there's no need for the food and lodging table. Though it might make things a bit more realistic if I developed each character by how much money he/she had to spend during their development peroid, such a task would be gargantuan because of the variety of external factors that would weigh on a character's development. No one else has been nuts enough to do this, and I'm not going to start the trend of environmental factors on development.

Yes, my swarthy warhorse trods on with a broken shoe. As a result he's become a bit lame and no, I can't buy the Plate barding because he's lame and the weight would cause him to faulter even more. I could buy the shoe, but it would mean doing without oats for the horse... hmmn. Yes folks, this is the stuff your Game Master (GM) should be looking at. I've played a few games that got to the kill everything stage where things became extremely boring. Sometimes it's good to focus on simple problems such as a horse that's going lame.

How to implement skill levels?

I'm trying to think about how I'm going to implement Character development skill levels. Ideally this would be a simple multi-dimensional array. Unfortunately it's not that easy. Skill development is further complicated by the fact that certain professions allow a skill to be developed differently than other professions. For example: Fighters can developing the climbing skill twice per level. It would cost a fighter 3 development points for the first skill level and 7 points for the next skill level. Sorcerers however, can only put one point into the climbing skill, and it costs them 7 development points. The only way I can see implementing this is on a case by case basis, a function for every skill. Even if I stick to the standard 28 skills it's a lot of work.

The solution for now is to move on to something else and keep this in the back of my mind.

Code started for improved genchar & C by Example

I started coding 0.8 of iceutils quite late this evening (after 11pm). I managed to get about 160 lines of code done, not much, but a start.

One of the problems in the past has been my limited programming skill. I've tried to supplement my skills with lots of books on C programming, but I always seemed to be running into problems here and there that were not explained clearly in the books I had, at least to my satisfaction... until now! Greg Perry's C by Example, despite it's big size, seems to be one of the simplest, yet complete, books on the market. While I won't be bombing through all the pages and becomming a C expert, it looks like it'll be a big help answering some of my C questions. Don't expect perfect code, or time-saving techniques, I'm sticking with simple to understand and easy to modify. I know this is subject to debate, and short is almost always sweeter. I just want things to be clear to me down the road. As I gain more skill I'll tighten up the code.

I'm thinking 0.8 will be the last feature release. In 0.9 I'll start working towards integrating tools, or at least adding a text-front end. At work I have a shell script that creates various floppy images (Windows password cracking floppies, boot disks, etc.). The tool would be similar, just a program linking other programs.

What I'm currently working on, character generator

In the past I've used a few character generation tools for various operating systems and I really haven't found any cool generation tools that I really liked. I found one that came close. I think it came close because it took a very procedural approach:

1. Choose what you want to be (Monk, Thief, Ranger, Fighter, Sorcerer, etc.)
2. Choose a race
3. Roll your stats
4. Equip your character

Of course with Rolemaster there are a slew of skills to be considered, and a slew of professions.

What does this mean? It means that version 0.8 is likely going to take some time to develop. Consider the following:

• In just the general Rolemaster there are 19 professions. If I used any of the Rolemaster Companions that number would go way up!
• There are 11 races, and while it's possible to use all races for all professions, it's probably better to limit any races where there would be a negative impact on one of the 2 primary stats for each profession.
• There are 10 stats, but doubled, temp and potential. These stats change depending on level, and there's only the possibility (random) of raising some stats every time you go up a level.
  
• Then there are development points and skills. Determining the development points isn't too difficult once the stats are out of the way, the problem is the hundreds of skills and how to implement skills. I think it's just going to happen randomly with some skills slanted towards a particular profession. It'll probably be determined by a multi-dimensional array.

There's a lot to work through. I'm starting now.

About this web log

A few years ago I thought I'd try to come up with a program to help me create a fantasy world based on Iron Crown Enterprise's original Rolemaster fantasy role playing game. There have been 7 releases of these "ice" tools since the first incarnation. Along the way there have been a few missteps (long delays, and a huge code loss), but there's also been some highlights (people asking to borrow code for other projects). With this blog I'm hoping to not only document the development process, but provide an opportunity for the Rolemaster community to provide feedback. Iceutils is hosted on my Linux-games.ca web site.

IceUtils is a Linux command-line-based suite of gaming tools, but that doesn't mean they always will be! My plan is to work towards a graphical release in version 1.0. Until version 1.0 I'll continue to add features and tools. Why command-line tools and why Linux?

Originally my idea was just to create something simple that I could use to rapidly develop a fantasy world. The simplest way to do that was to create text tools. I didn't want to have to learn how to develop GUI software and spend time planning how to implement a GUI for such a diverse suite of tools. Yes, I could have simplified things, or written a GUI tool for each program, but I had a couple of other ideas in mind:

• Being able to use the tools in IRC, Internet Relay Chat
• Being able to pipe the results of the tools to a text-file

What's next? Read the next post...