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[Symphorien]

This looks great. I might suggest having a look at VBASE http://forums.nothingtolost.com/dicestation/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7. I've been, fiddling around with it and it is really useful and simple. Might be interesting for simplifing creature creation. Just a thought

[Vandala]

I probably have to clarify that the earlier picture is just for looks, NOTHING ON IT WORKS YET!

The buttons and such do nothing, there is no wiring behind it, it doesn't work at all yet, it cannot read,write or proccess any data, in fact it's not a program at all, I haven't touched or written a single line of code yet.

This is just how menu's assembled in wxglade look.

You could fiddle with it yourself if you want, just download it (and python), it's really easy (fun even). I could even upload the stuff in the picture if you people want to import it to see just how crappy it still is. 

PS: yes I will be using tabs eventually but even with tabs it's so much stuff that needs to be displayed. In an earlier version I had tabs going from one end of the screen to the other, and those were just for the types of .txt files I needed. 

I really hope you can get this going without losing steam, which is usually what seems to happen with projects like this. If possible (and it may not be), try to get a GROUP going so that you won't be the only one slowly going crazy in the night.

What's this group thing you speak of? How do I start one? I'm not savy at all about network tech, never use the stuff.

[Rochndil]

A group of people, ie a team to develop the application together. The more folks that contribute, the less likely that something will be missed, and the more likely that the workload won't drive you around the bend.

Rochndil, thinking about farming out some of the grunt work on his mod...

[Vandala]

A group of people, ie a team to develop the application together. The more folks that contribute, the less likely that something will be missed, and the more likely that the workload won't drive you around the bend.

Rochndil, thinking about farming out some of the grunt work on his mod...

Well, people can mess around with xwglade to find a menu they like or find intuitive to use. The workload doesn't bother me, it's figuring stuff out that is hard for me.
I fear though that is to many people come together things will start to get messy and I'll be unable to keep up with everyone.
The one thing people could do that would be invaluable is expanding on the wiki, the more info I can get off of the dwarf fortress wiki the easier it will be to incorporate all of DF's functions and options.
There are for example still a few creature tokens that have no info avalable in the wiki, now I will be able to add them to the program but I have no idea if they will actual work.

[Vandala]

Little update.

I think it's starting to look better. Tabs help. All the previous screens will be added under the tabs on the left.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Eagleon]

I was one of the people that tried to tangle with this sort of thing - I made a color descriptor importer/exporter just before one of the major versions came out. It was horribly messy and made in VB, so it's not around hehe.

What would be exceptionally helpful for the longevity of this project (though perhaps not for your sanity) is if you considered tags and their parameters on the level of a system of components. What I mean is that there's going to be a limited group of behaviors for values, that tags with parameters will accept some of the groups but not others, and that to add a tag, instead of worrying about every possible input value again, you go back and look at what behaviors for inputs you do have (color, strings, other tags), and use those first. Then if they don't match up at all, you add a new behavior/component so that you can use it if it comes up again later.

It would also be easy to model tag groupings this way (things like [SELECT_CASTE:BLAH], where it looks until it finds another [SELECT_CASTE]) - for every caste you find in the raw, you have a container component which contains all of its own tags separate from the rest in that creature. To extend the entity model metaphor if you've looked at it before, creatures would be components, not entities, but the archetype Creature entity would exist that contains all creature components, with methods to do things like look for duplicate creatures.

There's probably other ways to do this, but in general I think anything like this is going to have to implement some kind of relatively simple to maintain parameter control for tags down the line, since things are added/removed/become more or less acceptable as valid raws as Toady develops.

[Vandala]

Another image

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You can see buttons now (to activate abilities on the creature.) Some, when pressed are held down. (on/off switch basically)
There are also drop down thingies that let me limit your choices as you can see with the min/max depth of underground placement.
The ADD button next to the Biome adds another biome selector (as many as you need). Not that this works yet of course.

Now onward!! 

[Lysabild]

Best of luck with this, it looks good.

[Vandala]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Ok, I'll try to explain a little bit of how I see this thing working in my mind at the moment. With the help of the picture ^above^.

Already!

• On your leftmost side is a list of tabs. The top tab is a placeholder for general options that belong to the program. (still empty) I don't know if that's the best idea because I could also just add genuine menus like the [file : edit : view : history : bookmarks : tools : help] you see in firefox and generally every windows/linux program. (this would be preferable right?) The rest of the list is made up of all the possible types of "raw/objects" files that you can mod in dwarf fortress. (although I just noticed that I missed 3 located in "raw/object/text") Selecting any of these options takes you to it's tab (ALL the stuff that's right-side of it)
• Right now the tab "creature" is selected. Right-side of it (^top^) you can see two buttons saying "add creature" and "remove", underneath them is a creature list (empty right now, sorry.) This is where you select which creature you want to work on.
• Below the first list is another with it's own 2 buttons. By selecting a creature on the top list and using the new two buttons you can add and remove creatures that you want to add to your mod which will be displayed in the lower list. And I just see that I forgot a button, one that will save your collection of creatures to a place of your choice (choice box needs replacing with a proper directory selecting box, couldn't find one yet, don't think wxglade has one BUT my friend showed something made in python that will do the trick.) I realize that this may not be optimal since needing to select many, many creatures to add to a mod with such a small window/list is rather wearisome to work with, but right now thats all I got, alto I could probably just make it a pop-up window.
• With that out of the way, lets move another step to the right. At the top you see an box and two buttons, with these you can add castes tabs to the tab list directly below it. The cast tab here is just for show right now (and building necessity), normally you start without one since not every creature needs castes.
• You select the tab that says "creature" and you'll see... More tabs on it's right-side, lots of tabs! And this is finally where you start to freaking mod. Everything you can possibly add to a creature will be listed under those tabs (I hope, at least that's the idea of it.) The "creature" tab and "castes" tabs are there so you can edit your creature on both levels by choosing where you put certain abilities. Abilities put into the creature tab will work for all casts of that creature whereas those put under a certain caste will only apply to that caste of that creature. (you don't have to name those tabs "caste" by the way, choose something useful like "male" or "female", you get the idea.)
• I've only explained the modding of creatures so far but all the other stuff you can mod works exactly the same way (as long as we are talking about .txt files that is, I can't help you with the rest such as graphic mods or sound mods, at least not yet but that's a whole different card game.)
• I hope this was all understandable.

GAH! Forgot something again. Tooltips! I forgot to say that in the eventual final version tooltips will be added to every function and button. The tooltips will have all the info I can find on the wiki.

[Vandala]

Holy carp, bro! This stuff is amazing! Even if the program itself isn't out for a while, that list you made helps me a lot! I always have trouble making new creatures that aren't just re-skins of one in-game!

Keep up the good work, dude!

Sorry I forgot about you scion-of-fenrir, here are some links to make up for it, perhaps they can help you mod.

Creature tokens: for moding your creatures. http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Creature_token
Atribute information: for modding your creatures. http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Attribute
Personality information: for modding your creatures. http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Personality_trait
Skill information: for modding your creatures. http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Skill
Entity tokens: for modding your civilizations. http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Entity#Flavor

And some old list, but you can get to new stuff with the links, just keep looking at the top for versions. http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Category:40d:Modding

[Rochndil]

The GUI is looking good, I definitely think you're going in the right direction. If at all possible, make the program work as much like a standard Windows app as possible. Hopefully there will be tools available to make this pretty simple. The more you make it look and work like OTHER standard Windows apps, the less trouble (and questions!) you'll get from users.

Also, if possible (and you're willing), make the source available so that other folks can help with/build on your work. When you get to the stuff about modding MINERALS I'll definitely take a closer look...I've never been brave enough to mess with modding critters!

Rochndil, who still works on his big mod as time allows...

[Jemeni]

If you want some help, I offer my services. I know some basic scripting langs., java, and a little C++. I don't know python, but I can assure you that It will not be hard to learn.

If you don't think you would need my help then I still wish to tell you this. The parsing would probably be easiest with regular expressions. I know that they are a bitch, but they get the job done.

[Interus]

Would it be possible to combine certain tabs?  Like the wildlife and pet tabs.  Or the Megabeast, night creature, and lair tabs.  That might simplify the display, or it might just make the combined versions way to complex.

I think you'll need some way to check what other files there are for a lot of things.  Like, the program should either check that the bodypart you're trying to add actually exists or only show you which ones exist through a dropdown menu.  The first one might be slightly better, because it could allow a way to add bodyparts first, and then see which bodyparts need definitions when you start working on the appropriate raws there.  things like this would also apply to entities(checking that the creature and the items they can use also exist), and materials.

It really depends on how you choose to add those things though.  If the user types in a list of all the parts they want, it could be in the order they want, and the program could highlight the ones that don't exist yet, and add them to a display in the appropriate raw tab.  I think this way is more powerful, but it also requires at least some knowledge of the format.  And it's probably not necessary for things like equipment.  Maybe selecting a creature for a civ will allow you to pick one from a list, picking equipment is checking boxes based on what raws are loaded into the mod, and . . . ok, I can't really think of a smooth way to do body parts.  That sort of thing is vast and messy, and I don't know how you would do things like only allowing people to modify the material of body parts the creature has and things like that.

Hopefully this stuff helps, it seems like at least some of what you want is ideas for how this thing should work, and that's what I've come up with.

[Vandala]

There are basically two steps towards creating this program.

The first is the design of the GUI. The other is the coding that makes the GUI actually do what it's supposed to do.

How wxglade works is that it allows very easy editing and once your done designing you can push a button and out comes the python code you can directly copy/paste into your program code. Just connect the buttons and your done. Designing the GUI is the easy part. Connecting buttons, also easy. Figuring out what the buttons have to do is a little harder because we will need to have full working knowledge of dwarf fortress but that's provided by it's wiki. The harder part comes from writing to the txt files, an easy enough function in python but it's going to be the hell to figure out where to put everything and in what order. But that really depends on wither DF is going to bitch about order placement in it's creature files.

That last part is something I'd like to know and it's a job thats going to take some time, either to figure out or to design. If somebody could handle that I would be rather happy.

The job: Figure out the proper placement of all creature tokens until dwarf fortress no longer gives any errors. (have fun  )

(after all that we would still be in the apha stage without any 'special' stuff like adding item permissions across all civilization of an entire mod but those will come with time. as long as we can get a creature creator working I'll be happy. AAAAAND everything will of course be completely open source or whatever the right terminology is.)

[Vandala]

It's like I read your mind.  Just finished that.  (stuff still looks rather messy but that will eventually be cleaned up, right not it's more important that we can fit in every last damn button!!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Well looky here, only about less then one third of the skills can fit on a page. I wish I know how a simple scroll bar worked in wxglade, cause without that I can't add any more.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Things look better on the attribute side though, look how clean that looks.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yes, yes I can see the big black space in the corner there. That's on purpose, it's where a changing picture comes that will have helpful information on the tributes.