Ironwood Omnimedia

And by this I mean making the Character Sheets in the Character Manager much easier to customize. There is a lot of work going into making things easily accessible within this file. Most importantly is the CSS (style sheets that handle all of the window dressing and aesthetics of a web page) which has things broken down pretty tightly. A basic knowledge of CSS will be more than enough to apply changes and give a character sheet the unique flavor you need.

Its added a bunch of work on my already heaping pile o’-stuff-to-do, but ultimately it should be worth it. By designing things around a more generic framework and utilizing every element of the character sheets in a CSS format it will make future character sheets, and more importantly the ones you want to create, much easier to do. While CSS is a pretty standard way to go, I had originally built the character sheets with some very basic CSS elements. I basically tore it down and wrote it so that just about everything that should be customized is customizable within CSS.

The reason for limiting this is actually pretty simple. The HTML code that is ultimately used in the xsl style sheet is pretty damn big (over 2000 lines of code and counting). You only should mess with this thing if you are very comfortable with HTML and XSL. If you are not, and that means the majority of you, then your best bet is something smaller and more accessible, like the CSS. I could have trimmed down the Character Sheet base code to something smaller and more manageable but that would mean ultimately applying different scripting languages and really complicating the entire operation. I decided instead with a basic XHTML (HTML but more strict) inside of the XSL. If you can read/edit HTML you can change these elements in the XSL style sheet, if you really feel the need.

What can’t be changed? Well, only the physical layout of the tables can’t be changed. These are handled the way they are because of the range of variables that change them. However, you can change the backgrounds, fonts, heading sizes, etc. There will be some included text files that give a bit of a guide for setting these elements in the CSS.

Another plus is the standardization that I have introduced in the CSS also makes it much more likely to patch in an actual CSS customization wizard within the Character Manager for all those folks who don’t know a thing about CSS and don’t want to learn. I get you, cause I once road in that boat and I liked it just fine. So, I want to add this in the future but I am not going to hold back a release for something that only a small handful of people would even care about. However, I really think that once it is in there people will find they really will enjoy the little tweaks they can apply.

So, aside from the techy garbage, what does this mean? Firstly it means you can count on a bunch of community created Character Sheets to be knocked out much more regularly as it is now much easier to handle. However, CSS is not the safest way to handle things, unfortunately. There are some nasty little bastards who may try to exploit it. I’m going to have to set up some kind of validation for the CSS elements. Until then you can wait for the community to validate them first or just stick to official ones. I plan on holding some competitions for style sheets and create free downloads of the winners so that is another option as well.

Which brings me to one last thing: the big thing that will slow down release at this point is not development of the programs but something much more important to the entire community aspect of DPnP. There are some cool things coming up for this so I will have to reveal them in small doses as they are created.

Not much longer now.

Until next time, Happy Gaming!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2010 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Developer Blog, DPnP, E-RPG General Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.