Baby steps, baby steps...

**Pusher** · May 31st, 2007, 03:53

**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** · May 31st, 2007, 03:56

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** · May 31st, 2007, 08:32

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

**NymTevlyn** · May 31st, 2007, 17:08

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** · May 31st, 2007, 17:56

Originally Posted by 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.

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** · May 31st, 2007, 17:59

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** · May 31st, 2007, 18:23

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** · June 1st, 2007, 08:00

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 <html> tag, and you have to close that tag with </html> at the end. Inside that, the body of your web page is included inside <body> tags. You can then put content inside that, and if you want part of that in bold, you start it with a <b> tag.

In the same way, when you're doing a FG2 ruleset, you start a document with a <root> 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 <includefile>, <windowclass>, 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 <table> tags, which can contain <tr> tags, which can contain <td> 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** · June 2nd, 2007, 02:42

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

**sloejack** · June 3rd, 2007, 15:58

Originally Posted by 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.

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.

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