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Mathias
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
 
Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 13,213

Old December 5th, 2009, 05:13 PM
For the other Hero Lab data files, we've tended to avoid making random number generators part of the character creation process. If the game system calls for a random number, the user can use the dice roller or physical dice to generate the number themselves, but we haven't generally used buttons to generate a random number and select a thing from a table/menu based on that number (the only exception I can think of is height and weight in d20/Pathfinder, which requires addition and multiplication after the roll to get the final result. Also, the results of the height and weight don't influence anything else).

Now, organization. Since you have 100+ options for the same thing, you'll need to think about how to display that to the user. Are there many that are actually the same thing? Are they in distinct groups within the program? Is this background text that won't affect anything else on the character, and can therefore be left as text?

Check out the thing_gear.dat file in the Savage Worlds file. The first items listed there are the separators. You'll note that each has

Code:
 
isshowonly="yes"
as one of its settings, and each one has one of the GearType tags that are used to sort gear into the various categories.

Perhaps the initial d10 roll would be appropriate to turn into a category. Then you make a separator for #1, #2, etc. Then use the explicit tag group:

Code:
<tag group="explicit" tag="1"/>
within each group to sort them from 1-10 for the second die roll. So, the user will see a separator for #1, followed by the 10 results in that table (in order), then the #2 separator, and its results, and so on, which should make it easier to scroll quickly to the correct section of the list and find the selection you've rolled.

As a thought, you might start the name of the option that's a roll of 3, followed by a roll of 4 with [3,4] or something like that.

Last edited by Mathias; December 5th, 2009 at 05:15 PM. Reason: spelling error
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