Wednesday 24 October 2018

Equipment Engineer GUI finished!

I have started work on Equipment Engineer, and over the course of this week I have nailed down the GUI. This was always the biggest challenge of EE for me, as I couldn't quite see an easy way to do it. A tab for each type of item might have worked, but it would have been annoying. Cramming everything onto one page would be better, but confusing as not all items require all fields.

I settled on disabling all fields that don't pertain to the selected item type. This seems to work well, and early feedback seems to approve. I also moved descriptive text, No-ID text and item image to a second tab, freeing up plenty of space to work with.

A couple of decent discussions on Discord and the FG Forums helped distill my ideas, and threw up a couple of items that I knew nothing about. You'll now be able to set the crit range and the reroll trigger for a weapon. I also found out you can add more than one damage roll per weapon, and have multiple damage types. All of these new ideas show the benefit a 'hive mind' brings to a project, and it makes me grateful that there's a community building around Engineer Suite.



There are a couple of features I inend to build in that have got me excited. Firstly, weapons. NPC Engineer has a weapons table (for use by NPCs) and it makes sense to allow linking of these two areas. It'll take a bit of tweaking but I'll get there.

The other one is the ability to build a pack with items in it that can be dragged to a character's inventory. This isn't something you can do from within FG, so I am keen to get this enabled. As it will require a lot of data input to allow for a list to select from, this will be put off until the base load/save/parse functions are enabled.

So it seems I have some sort of creativity back, and I am enjoying my programming again. I have a roadmap. I feel all set to work EE through to completion in as short a time as possible.

Don't forget to check out the Patreon site for 'work in progress' videos that are freely available to everyone (and also the series of tutorial videos for Engineer Suite that are available to Patrons).

Let me know if anything is missing here, on Discord, on FG forums, on the Patreon site or on the Github issue tracker. :)

Thanks

Maasq

5 comments:

  1. Hi - I love the Suite and have been using it to successfully add 5E Adventures in Middle Earth NPCs from pdf documents. I today installed the most recent version, and a parsed '*.mod' file throws up an error when trying to load into Fantasy Grounds:

    Database Error: A XML parse error occurred processing file FILENAME:client.xml - Error on line 156: Error reading end tag.

    This means that it can no longer be used to create NPCs that are readable by FG.

    I used the previous version to generate ~100 npcs in a module and never received this error.

    Any guidance would be gratefully received.

    Sincerely, John

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi John

    Firstly, it isn't anything to do with the version - nothing about the area of the application that is giving you issues was touched or changed in several months. You have a single error on 1 line of the code, so it is perhaps unfair to say 'This means that it can no longer be used to create NPCs that are readable by FG.'
    You reported this issue on Github too, and you supplied the file that was causing issues. That was a huge help in pinpointing the problem, so thank you! I replied over there, saying that the issue was with the description area of your town guard NPC. It looks like you have changed the formatting of it a few times and this has caused an issue. I did some work on this area of the application last night and hopefully it will improve things.
    The Rich Text box is the bane of my life :) The RTF code is so different from tags that it is difficult to accurately change from one to another. If you get this sort of error again, go back to your NPC and simplify this box.

    Hope this helps
    Maasq

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi. Apologies for the duplicate post and sensationalist comment. The issue was down to my lack of knowledge of the tool, not the tool itself. A note tool such as Notepad ++ strips out any weird formatting from PDFs and proves to be a helpful ally. I've had few issues since you flagged the bullet point issue. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  4. No worries at all. I will be releasing the tweaked version later today, and coincidentally the tutorial video I'm about to upload to the Patreon site (https://www.patreon.com/engineersuite) is on using the 'Description' tab.
    I'm glad you're enjoying the tool, and I liked how you were using the Description box for your NPCs motivations.

    Maasq

    ReplyDelete
  5. You'll now be able to set the crit range and the reroll trigger for a weapon. remediation

    ReplyDelete