Here is my progress so far. I have the core program working now with the new info. But, still trying to figure out the display issue. I have an idea on how to make it work, but my initial attempt failed so, undid it for now so I could post working files.
I prefer to work directly with the files, and not thru the interface. So, it took about 15 hours simply to get things re-organized and readable. But, now its all nice and pretty in there so any changes that need to be made should be easily findable and made quickly.
http://www.stubbdog.com/stuff/ab3/2007/s007.zip
I have included the warlord.def file, common.dat, and reptus.dat. Someone else is helping me port over the rest of the datacards over. Manually doing it would take a few hours with each fction, and he said he could write a script in Perl or C# that coud do it much quicker. So, should have that shortly. But, I did the reptus so that I could have a working one to go on.
I still have a few things to do with these files. Like updating some of the spells, affects of some of the equipment, and update the affects of some faction SAs. But, overall its working now.
Related to the SA split idea, I will see i I can explain my take on it. I dont kno the technical jargin of xml so, I can just talk based on the current and proposed variable names. If you look in the files you will see that all of the SAs are basically set to type"c_ability" and then the c_abilty uses o_ability to move them down to the bottom of the list when it has multiple DTs. Well, I am thinking that we may not be able to achieve the horizontal layout of the datacards, but we could at least split up the abilities into four types: c_mability, c_nability, c_rability, c_cability - model, melee, ranged, casting. and then have four examples of the o_ability too: o_mability, o_nability, o_rability, o_cability. Each doing the exact same thing the original one file was suppose to do, but each with a different index or priority level, such that you could stack them at the bottom. My first attempt at this create an error, something about PCData error on a link to PCData... I cant remember the exact error. I just wanted to bounce this one off you and talk more on whether my thinking is straight.
I will talk more on this idea after I have finished cleaning up the last few things on te current files.