Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader

[Mathias]

Before you get started on the skills and talents, give me a chance to wrap up the Pathfinder Bestiary project. When I first tried writing DH files, I ended up running into a wall in terms of how to set the advancement costs of abilities. I actually went a ways down a path that doesn't turn out to work, so I'm afraid it'll be easier to restart than to remove those mechanisms.

Okay, here's an overview of what needs to happen for skill and talent advancement in Dark Heresy, in Hero Lab's terms.

In Hero Lab, information can only be stored on something that has already been added to the hero. If you take a rank in your Career, that rank needs to tell every skill and talent it could add what XP cost it's offering them at. In order to do so, the skills and talents have to have been added already. There's a mechanism in Hero Lab called shadowing that's designed to handle this sort of thing - a shadow copy of every skill and talent is present on every character, but any scripts on those skills/talents (like Sound Constitution adding an extra wound) won't be run, and they won't be displayed in any of the lists that the user sees. The copies exist only for the purpose of storing the fact that you can take the +0 level of this skill for 100, the +10 level for another 100, and the +20 for 200.

I'm afraid I won't have time until I'm finished with the Bestiary (hopefully around the middle of next week) to organize the ideas I've had floating around in my head about how to store the XP cost information.

[shinma72]

Understood. In the meantime, I'll look over the documentation and do what I can to orient myself and see what ideas come to me as well.

[Mathias]

If you get to that point, you could begin working on things like the Home World, Career and Career ranks. You can assemble the mechanics of how the user will go about selecting those and how they interact, just leave out the skills and talents granted/available for now.

My suggestion for Home Worlds and careers would be choosers on the static panel (the row of information at the top of the screen) (the existing race mechanics can simply be renamed to become the Home World mechanics, and the careers can be created by duplicating the Race mechanics).

Background packages, career ranks, alternate career ranks, elite advance packages, transition packages, and the ranks of ascended careers can all be placed in the same table, I think- create a component that's shared by all those things, and then extra components for each specific thing - that's where you'll set up the differences - for example, packages can have XP costs, but career ranks don't. On the other hand, career ranks require that a character advance to a certain level, so the career rank component will contain those mechanics.

[rob]

I think there's a much cleaner and simpler way to implement the DH/RT files than we originally conceived. This is due to some additional functionality we added in V3.6. Handling all the skills/talents vis-a-vis XP expenditures can be achieved by leveraging the new bootstrap mechanisms, and it can be done in a way that encapsulates all the nastiness into component scripts so that entering all the data is relatively easy. Or so I believe.

This is probably something that Mathias and I should discuss offline, since I'll be able to explain it more easily to him (due to his indepth knowledge of Hero Lab authoring) and he'll be able to try shooting holes in it (due to his knowledge of the game). If the approach seems viable after that, it's something we can outline here or potentially write the code for.

[shinma72]

@rob sounds good to me. What I had previously been doing prior to this thread was create a new game in the auth kit and slowly overwrite pieces here and there where the actual mechanics, I hadn't yet.

[Spoike]

I'm super excited that this discussion is moving forward. I won't be much help with figuring out the mechanics as I'm extremely slow with the code writing. But I am deffinatly willing to do the data entry for skills, weapons, etc.

[jonbartels]

any plans as to where to share the files?

[shinma72]

Originally Posted by jonbartels

any plans as to where to share the files?

I'm thinking once we start talking about mechanics and the like, it will be discussed as to where we will be hosting files. Two senior members are currently on another project and will contact us when they are ready for us to delve into it. It won't hurt for us to make sure we read up on the rules and think about how it's going to fit into HL for when we actually start the creation.

[Mathias]

The Bestiary ended up taking all of last week, so we've started discussing how to handle this today - we haven't forgotten you.

[Meatpuppet]

Any news on this ?