Online Playing Aide Design

[shadowsdawn]

Hi everyone,

Many months ago I spoke with some of the people of Project Aon about a playing aide I was starting to work on. The intent was to provide a fully accessible, automated, and data persistent web based version of the books where you can log in and pick up wherever you left off. I actually got to a point where the mechanics were all coded in properly and was starting to add in the content for Flight from the Dark, and then I scrapped it because I didn't like how clunky it was. Well, it wasn't clunky for the players, but from the backend, it was far from how I would have liked it to be. Least I can say that for the most part it was all being done to test the tools out and see what I could do with it.

Well now I have more knowledge of how to work with the tools I was using to make it, and I thought I would try to tackle it once again. However, before I begin again, I'm trying to layout the things I know I need to be aware of. My list is as follows, if there is anything you can think of or even comments to make on things here or you feel I've forgotten something, please feel free to comment! That way I can avoid the clunky feeling this time around.

Character Creation:

1) Generate Combat Skill
2) Generate Endurance Completed

Choosing Kai skills:

1) Choose 5 if this is the first book.
2) Add 1 if successfully completed a prior book.
3) Auto-handling of Weaponskill random choice.

**Nearing completion. Data structures to store this info to char sheet and retrieve it to memory are in place.


Items:

1) Armor adds Endurance as appropriate
2) Potions heal as appropraite.
3) Auto-adjust CS for weapon wielded (or lack thereof) and Weaponskill
4) Handle limitations to # of items carried
5) Work out starting equipment for adventure as appropriate
6) Handle items/chests in sections as appropriate
6a) Prevent from gaining more items from section than allowed. (i.e. getting 2 meals when only one is actually present)
7a) Room appropriately stocked for each player to enter
7) Limit to 1 logged in player to a section?

Combat:

1) Calculate Combat Ratio
2) Run combat according to Combat chart for the book
3) Adjust Endurance for both after each round
4) Combat ran in rounds, with player choosing to continue.
5) If option available, allow escape after min round if desired
6) Handle escaping as appropriate
7) Death - delete char entirely, or restore to previous state before beginning the book?
8) Handle Mindblast/Mindshield as appropriate for both parties.

Navigation:

1) Appropriate navigation through sections
2) Offer appropriate alternate choices depending on skills/items possessed.
3) Handle Healing if possess skill
4) Can only proceed forward
5) Handle meals as needing, taking into consideration possession of Hunting skill.

Special Circumstances:

1) As needed by the book.

[alderaine]

Hi There

I currently look after developer support for AON - mostly from an encouragement point of view.

You are certainly on the right lines, but the thing that jams many such projects is dealing with the complexity of the pages themselves - Joe wrote in very complex English, making it hard to boil the text down to simple rules for computers - new rules appearing all the time!

We are slowly looking to create some "navigation files" to resolve many of these issues, essentially detailing everything a computer needs to know about each page. Dave is furthest along with this on Seventh Sense, so we are currently holding our breaths to see the file format that comes out of that project, with an eye to adapting it into the core XML.

It looks like you are well on the right lines, and a key project is definitely to get an online version up & running, so we will be very interested to see progress.

The next step is to put together book 1 as an example, not worrying too much about future-proofing the code at this stage as we all have to re-write our projects when we attempt book 2 - so much changes! Like anything, it is best to learn from experience though.

All the best

James

[shadowsdawn]

Thanks for the response James.

Mainly I was just looking at what are the core rules things that, for the most part, remain consistent. If I had that, I could get together the basic code that can handle the bulk of the work, and then worry about individual exceptions and such as they come up. The stuff I am using to do this allows me to write some base code rules that can be available for any situation, and then I can inject and override those rules on the fly when needed to

I'll keep something updated on how it is going though.

[alderaine]

Hmm - very little unfortunately!
You might think something like food - but very quickly, the rules vary quite heavily.
The best way is to detatch the "sheet handling methods" (i.e. anything which changes the character sheet itself) from the book handling methods - that way, whatever comes up in the book logic, you can simply call the standard methods you are using on the sheet. The sheet methods are of course pretty straightforward (hence why there are quite a few character sheet managers out there, but very few book managers!)

There is no single, definitive list yet - nobody has made it past book 3 that I know of (book 3 is very complex in itself!) although it looks like Dave will at least cover the first series in his next release.

Dave - if you are following this thread, do you have a list of "rules of thumb" which may help out here?

[Dave]

Jan 5, 2009 10:09:39 GMT alderaine said:

we all have to re-write our projects when we attempt book 2 - so much changes!

This is so true! By the time I put book 3 in, I was tired of applying band-aid after band-aid, and realized that a complete re-write was better in the long-run. By that time, I'd learned a lot more about programming in general and more about what the needs of the program were to interpret the books well. I've been trying to "future-proof" this one as much as possible. We'll see!

One of the things you need to make provision for is the variations in combat that Joe writes. You need a way to have "custom" combats, such as if you get hit, roll another Random number to see if you get poisoned, or keep track of damage because you need to restore 1/2 EP lost, or if you are damaged at all, insta-death (Kalkoths). And sometimes, even though LW is armed, he is taken by surprise and must fight unarmed for the first 2 rounds... That sort of thing!

Combat is one of the most varied things in the books. I'd recommend scanning each and every combat in the first 3 books at least and jot down the different variations you see (+/- CS, +/- EP, conditions like Mindsheild, etc...) That will give you a better idea of what you need to include in your code.

One other thing is dealing with money. Crowns are simple, the rest is not. If you're intending to support past book 5, I'd recommend you start off with ways to deal with the different currencies (or you'll be applying lots of band-aids when the time comes!)

You also need a way to track whether the player has visited certain places (graveyard of the Ancients, for example).

Meals are also not completely straightforward, as alderaine pointed out. Sometimes the player has the option of paying for a meal or eating one from his backpack. Or instead of losing 3 EP, he'll lose 2 EP (poor meal shared w/ captain in book 2), for instance. And then there are those times when you can or can't use Hunting (mostly you can, but not always!)

And the gambling sections in book 2 are killer for me. I hope you can find a simpler solution than I did! Took me several hours to do one of them yesterday (but it works quite nicely).

That's all that comes to mind at the moment. Sounds like a great project. Good luck!

[shadowsdawn]

Yup, I know things will alter for each book as different situations come up. I suppose I should have been more clear on what I meant when I said I was looking for he core stuff. I know that not everything on my above list is a core item. Some of it was general framework, others were things that I know would be coming up at random times and have varying rules for negotiating how it happens. Basically the list was things I knew needed to be address somehow, as they come up in practically every book.

With the stuff I am using a lot of this is fairly easy to implement quickly and have it set up to handle exceptions to the 'rules' for each section. The fact that the backbone of what I am using has Python implemented as the scripting language helps a lot in that regard.

Just wanting to make sure that it is known that I do fully understand that there will be no one fool proof method that will handle everything flawlessly. However, I can take the time to make sure what I do have is designed in a way that it can be malleable for the situation at hand.

Thanks again for the advice though. I'm looking forward to getting things back to where I was previously before I scrapped things due to not implementing them cleanly.

[shadowsdawn]

Thanks for the heads up Dave!

I was planning on going back through the books again to look for info like that after I got the full on initial char gen together, which I'm actually hoping to be able to have done tonight. Just depends on how much time I get after work.