At 10:55 AM 3/25/2007, you wrote:
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I don't understand what you mean by "choose what DAT file to be loaded for that particular game option". Please explain what you'd like to accomplish in more detail and I'll be able to answer concretely.
Maybe I am wrong, but the way I see Dat files, dat files are like supplement books. So if I have a campaign that uses all the possible books, then I have a campaign that uses only 2 of the books. I would like to be able to tell HL to complile the 2 books but not the rest of the books, without manually going into the HL directories, then either renaming or deleting files.
The way I was thinking it would work is the HL lab would check what Dat and Pkg files are available and let the user select what files to load.
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Ah! Now I understand. Thanks for the explanation.
Our model is a bit different from the model used by other tools. Basically, the HL engine allows you to turn large groups of things on and off at run-time. This can be controlled by the Configure Hero form. Users will be able to define their own "rulesets" that correspond to individual supplements. Then the material from that supplement is tied to that ruleset. Using the Configure Hero form, users will be able to turn on/off which supplements they want to use for a given character. This also means you'll be able to change the selections on-the-fly after creating the character.
You can see how this works with the included Lone Wolf content. Within the Configure Hero form, you can turn on/off whether the Lone Wolf content is made available. A single toggle within teh Configure Hero form allows you to activate or disable a large set of classes, feats, skills, gear, magic items, etc. This is exactly how supplements will optimally work.
If you take a look at the Lone Wolf content in the editor, you can see that tying something to a ruleset is trivial. For example, take a look at the feat "Cold Iron Chef". The easiest way to do this is to simply create a new feat based on the Cold Iron Chef to view then, then throw it away without saving it. You'll see that the feat has a Condition defined for it. A Condition test is what HL uses to verify whether something is to be made available to the user based on the configuration settings (i.e. the rulesets selected by the user). The lone Condition for the feat tests the presence of a tag. The tag is the one that is automatically defined by HL whenever the user enables the "Lone Wolf Open Content" option within the Configure Hero form. So making a thing dependent on a supplement will be as easy as adding a Condition test of "ruleset.Supplement".
The problem right now is that we don't have the ability to define new rulesets exposed to users yet. The reason is simply that we haven't documented it yet. Adding a new ruleset is easy (give it an id and name, then assign it to a group in the list), and this should all be documented in May. I'd like to say it will be earlier, but I don't think we'll pull that off. We've got lots of stuff to get into place for the other game systems prior to a show in late April where we'll be meeting with all the publishers. So I don't see us realistically getting the documentation written until after that show.
I'll talk to Colen and we'll see if there's a way we can get something into place for this purpose earlier. The only issue is what level of dependencies might exist in getting the stuff added to the docs. Since you guys are now asking for it, though, it's time we got this actually exposed. If we only had a few more hours in each day..... :-)
I hope this explanation helps. Let me know if you still have questions.