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That is a great idea. I have a set of working tabs, so with a little creative photo-shopping I can do a graphical mock-up too. (Not that I can actually achieve what I can dream in photo-shop. But it is a target to aim for.) And don't worry about throwing ideas out there. I'm find it stimulating and you are already causing me to improve on my vision. I look forward to seeing your ideas, sharing my own, and fusing the best of both worlds within the scope of what I can actually code. If you are interested enough to do some coding, maybe we can share that part too. No pressure though. No obligations. Consider it an invite.

But if you are interested, and once we hammer out a draft vision, I could focus on the tab and roster framework in the near term, get that into a stand-alone modular state, and then turn you loose with it to take it in whatever feature direction you choose while I focus on another feature. Programing by committee! What could go wrong? lol
Worst case, we wind up with two roster programs covering two visions and there would be nothing wrong with that. Anyway. Let me know what you are game for. I'm flexible. And weather you choose to be a suggestion person or a hands-on coder, this is a project I'm excited to do. 

-CW

"Of COURSE the laundry is clean. The cat is sleeping on it, isn't she?"

Ah yeah, but this is our thread so WTH. LOL

So you didn't have a Druid? Yeah, I hated elite hunters and their pets. They suck for any sort of priest.

You have almost the full collection! I have an 80 ally shadow priest, a Horde 80 shadow priest, an 80 death-knight I never played after getting  him leveled, a 70 Pally, and a lvl 12 fire mage I never really warmed to. Of them all, melting faces with my shadow priest was by far the best. The only drawback with my shadow priest was that he was way.. too squishy for the 3v3 arenas, so I missed out on the very top-tier goodies. Still, Themender could hold his own in a fight and I regularly finished near the top of the heap when we won in the Battlefields.

Which char. was your favorite to play? Did you get heavy into raids? I did for a short while, but I found that I didn't care for the sort of questing schedule you had to keep up in order to participate. Nope. I would much rather join my mates in The Tram Pirates guild to raid the Ally tram and try to hold it for as long as possible against all comers. We sometimes all dressed in pirate garb, complete with bird pets, took it over, and held it. Arr..!! Thar be some fun!!

I even found a glitch in the game which allowed us to sneek into the Ally city without going through either the front or the back gate. You had to levitate/climb up a certain mountain to reach an area where only the wire-frame of the game existed, then drop through a pond which caused you to fall through the game and into the Mage Tower inside the Ally city. (They have fixed that glitch now.) We almost got busted by a GM once, when one of our party got hung up in the rafters where the bug dropped us. Fortunately, the rest of us had logged, just before the GM showed up, and our buddy wouldn't tell the GM who it was that showed him how to use the exploit. Wheew! From then on we did it the hard way.  -Storming the front gate, making a dash for the tram, and then summoning the rest of the party in.

-CW

Hmm.. maybe we can do that format in the popup screens once a unit on the roster is clicked on. We can leave the labels definable by the GM, so he can lay them out similar to what ever unit/character sheet he likes; all savable to a library, of course. I'm warming to the idea. 
-CW

WOW! You got bit harder with War Craft than I did. I only spent 5 years on that. And most of that time I played but a single character, a Shadow Priest in the BattleGrounds.

I LOVED PvP. I still do. My serious distraction today is Team Fortress 2. For fantasy, I'm actually thinking of giving the computer a rest and getting back into board gaming. I am seriously eyeing the game Mage Knight, which, according to the reviews, is supposed to have one of the best solo-play systems around. If only the rules book weren't such a hot mess. That is the only thing putting me off.

-CW

Ah yes, Fuzz.

I see what you are thinking, but I'd like stay even more generalized than that.

The program should be so general that it can be used equally well with games from D&D, to Battle in the Pacific, to Civil War miniatures, to Car Wars. I have a space-feet combat game, sort of like what you would find with a Star Trek combat game, called StarFire. There are literally dozens of different ships with different destructible components such as Hull, Cargo, Crew Compartment, Engines, Torpedo rooms, and so on. (The parallels to War Hammer 40k are obvious.)

To be able to accommodate all of the different types of games and all of the different types of stats a GM may want stat bars for, we can't hard-code ANY specific stat into the Roster program except for one: 'Health.' Be it a hell-cat in D&D or a Hell Cat in the air, the concept of 'health' still applies. A lot of non-changing specific stats for a unit, such as movement allowance or IQ, could be listed in the text description portion of a unit.

Now what you have done with the weapons is interesting. Maybe we could adapt a type of library which would load individual stats, each with a comment of its own. Than a GM could pick and choose among weapons for a unit, be it a mace or a Class II phaser. Hmm.. I'll have to think on that. But I like it!

Examples are better than descriptions, so give me a few weeks to hammer out a rough framework for what I have in mind and we can go from there. Over the next few days I'm going to study Kitty Hello's DDgui toolbox and see what I can draw on for our program.

-CW

I remember GURPS! Are you old enough to remember the wonderfully simple game which inspired it? Actually, two complimentary pocket games which were part of The Fantasy Trip. They were Wizard and Melee. I still have both games in their original plastic envelopes, along with half a  dozen or so solo adventure modules for them.

In Melee, your character had just three stats: Str, Dex, and IQ.  Each character was allowed two weapons, one ready and one slung. The rules booklet for the entire game were only 21 pages long, and each page was smaller than half a sheet of paper.

The expansion, Wizard, brought spell-casters to the arena, but the rules booklet to add Wizards is shorter still as half the booklet are lists of spells the magic users can learn.
Ah, those were the days! The roar of the crowd! The clang of weapon on armor! The gnashing of teeth! The spilling of precious cheese-curls! Yes, those were the days.
-CW

I can vouch for SMOOTHSHADING FALSE. I have used it to magnify sprites for my sprite editor, and it delivers a VERY sharp, pixel-perfect image under magnification.

It is possible that some pixels could get mangled on rotation, trying to map circular paths onto square grids, but that would be the fault of the universe as a whole, not the command. And no permanent damage is done to the image.
-CW

[Make a project]

This message is for anyone who would like to use DDgui features in their own programs.
Today I ran into a lot of trouble trying to load up the DDgui toolbox. I made some mistakes; yet my mistakes are your opportunity to avoid them.

If you read the DDgui text file (which is included in two formats in the DDgui folder), you will read the following:

Make a project
First thing you do is to create a project, then add the DDgui.gbas file from the
Samples/common directory to your project. Just use the "file" tab at the right side of
the GLBasic editor to do this.

(See Screenshot_1)

The process looks pretty straight forward, and it is; so long as you pay close attention when the instructions say to add the DDgui.gbas file from the Samples/Common folder. If you look for this file in the DDgui folder, like I did, you will not find it. You WILL find a file named DDgui (see ScreenShot_2), but that is the wrong file. That is a .gbap project file, not a .gbas file.

Load that one up and you are screwed. The file will jump to the 'Other' branch of the tree, rather than 'Sources', and your program will throw the puzzling syntax error on line 1, as seen in my original post at the very top of this thread. Try to run that and the editor will drop your program and load up the DDgui_test program from the Samples folder instead! Make any changes trying to figure out what went wrong, and at that point you are only one 'Run' click away from screwing up the demo file as well!
(See ScreenShot_3)

However, don't panic. The fix is quite easy once you understand what went wrong. None of the files you want or need have been lost. You only have to know where to look for them. The associations are just messed up, that's all. To repair the damage, do the following.

First go to the Files tab on the right side of the editor.
Delete any files present under 'Other', as well as any .gbap files which may be listed under 'Sources'.
Left click on 'Sources' and choose the Add function. A file select wizard will open.
Go to GLbasic, Samples, _Projects_, Common folder (NOT the DDgui folder!), click on the DDgui.gbas file and click 'OK'.

If your project looks like Screen_Shot_4, with your own project name listed alone under "Main Program", DDgui.bas listed under "Sources", and nothing under "Other", then you are golden.

The powerful DDgui toolbox is loaded up and is yours to configure and command. (I found that the creation of a nice custom font to use with DDgui, loaded and set, can really make the interface pop!)

Cheers!
-CW

Well now, that is odd.

After comparing your screen shot to my own GLbasic editor, I noticed that I had three files loaded, rather than just your two. I had a Main Program file, a Sources file, and one 'Other' file. When I deleted the "Other" file DDgui complied and ran just fine for me from the Samples folder. Doubtless I screwed things up somehow on my original attempt to load the project and wound up saving it back to my system. If I go home and the project loads without a hitch on my desktop, than that must be what I did.

Thanks Mr. Toad! Your input has resolved my dilemma. 
-CW

Ok, Thx Toad. I'll have another go at it this evening. -CW

Hi all,

I have been exploring KittyHello's DDgui toolbox, and I am very impressed with how fast, smooth, and handy DDgui is.
I had some trouble with it, though. I could not get it to run when loading it as an existing project from the GLbasic Samples folder. When attempted, I received the following error: (See attached image.) Debug mode gave no additional information.

It took me about an hour to get DDgui to work, and only after transplanting the 'DDgui_Test' main program, the 'Sources' code, and the associated apps folder to a fresh "sandbox" project, which I had made so as to work from a clean slate. I also had to reset the current directory and create a new custom font, and I'm not entirely sure I've captured full functionality.

The programing in DDgui is well over my head, and I wasn't able to do more than beat at it with a stick in the hopes that it would start to run for me. Fortunately, this approach seemed to work. I would love to see DDgui in its native state, as intended, so that I can assess its full capabilities (just in case I broke something when poking it with my stick.)

Has anyone else had this trouble, or does anyone know what the message, 'syntax error' in line one is referring to?

Thanks!
-CW

PS: If you haven't checked out DDgui yet, you definitely owe it to yourself to do so.

Cool Moru. Thanks!!
-CW

Thx Fuzz.

I don't have any formal training in databases. I once wrote a set of utilities for use with a de-clawed cue-cat bar code scanner, to search, reference, alphabetize, add and delete items from a master list based on the bar code.

My current project will be a step above that, involving multiple and user-creatable libraries with entries of variable sizes. Every entry would have the same form and be separated by a "|" token. The form would be thus: four fixed attributes, UnitName$,  UnitDescription$, Unit_Health%, and Unit_PNG$ thumbnail path, followed by a series of attributes; StatName$ and StatValue, for however many stats a given unit needs. A set of these unit types forms a library, weather it be a Warhammer library, a D&D player library, a Creature library or so on. Units from any given library can be loaded into any of eight rosters, and thereby form a player army. So it isn't enough to simply look up units from a library, they have to be copied over to form player rosters which can then be modified as damage is done to a given unit. Rosters units must be deletable (when dead) or not (so they can be 'healed' or rezed.) In many ways managing the rosters will be more challenging than managing the static library lists.

Including weapons as items with their own stats would be problematic, for then we need some way of chaining a weapons 'unit' to a creature 'unit'.  Hmm.. We could include a simple descriptions of any weapons and damage potential in the text of the Unit description, or even display, in a very simple way, a given weapon as an attribute with its own health bar as one of the Unit attributes; but the ability to call up a library of weapons to pick and choose from for a given unit is an entire level of complexity, the implementation vision of which eludes me. But now that the seed is planted, I'll have to chew on it. Maybe that can be a goal for version 2.0.

The program itself will be fairly inert towards any given roster, unit or attribute. No animation, no automated updating of stats. Nothing taken for granted. The program largely won't know what a stat is or means. So any changes must be made by the GM. (Maybe I can grey a unit when it's health bar reaches zero.) The program will simply show a list of units on a roster with a 'health' stat bar next to it. Click on a unit and a detailed description including the full set of stats and a thumb-nail (if present) will open in a window. Up to two windows (for two units from up to two rosters) can be open at the same time. To change a stat, simply click on the desired stat and a set of buttons will appear by which the stat can be changed by +/- 1, 5, 10, 100. This will modify the stat, even taking it to a negative value. Very easy for a GM to modify on the fly in the heat of a game.

The real challenge isn't in the libraries, which will be very simple text file lists. The challenge will be in formatting all of this on the screen and keeping track of each stat location on the roster and in the pop-up windows so they can be clicked on and modified. Throw list scrolling in there and things will get very complicated very fast. That is what scares me about this project. I may be over my head. lol

Anyway, as a data-base, the libraries will be very bare-bones and simple things; which is all I can really handle.

I've never heard of MySQL. Do you think it might be of help given what I have in mind? I would love it if you can give me a link or two to check out.
I'm not worried about efficiency of library file sizes (at least for version 1.0), but the data must be in a format which can be easily fed into my Unit TYPE structures.
That being said, anything which can make the job easier will be very welcome, so I am eager to take advantage of any advice you can give.

Cheers, Lee!
-CW