I was just forlornly staring at the GitHub as a matter of fact.
What a coincidence!
Though in my case it's more staring at the code trying to remember which bits to store on the page so an entirely different script can do battle calcs with them (my eternal hatred for programmatically figuring out weapon triangles shines bright here). You can call multiple functions from one web element, though, so updating HP/QL after the battle calcs have messed with it is doable.
- How do I import/export sheets on a desktop app? (Probably not too hard but I need to do research.)
- Am I going to have special setup requirements or can I make this work with just an .exe?
- I imagine I'd need to have a thing built into the app that will say "there's a new update!" or something.
- Probably lots of other things that I can't anticipate.
The potential for a desktop app is much greater. You could actually build off of that code to make a proper thing that could do more of the GMing tasks, but for now I'm just thinking about a battle calculator.
Thoughts?
-Pretty much the same. The advantage of JSON import/export is that it's automatic. Manual parsing is tedious but pretty simple once you settle on a format. EXEs also aren't as touchy about messing with the hard drive as web pages, so storing/retrieving files locally rather than manually copy+pasting is easier.
-The latter, though feeding in external files (custom weapons, existing charsheets) might be nice.
-Trying to get it to check for updates strikes me as overly complicated.
-GUI creation, for one. If you've gotten familiar enough with that in C# that you'd prefer it to HTML/CSS, there's no problem. Otherwise, we'd be taking a step down graphically.
There's also the more general danger in abandoning stuff you have to build a newer and better version. Sometimes it's a good idea, sometimes it forms a vicious cycle. :<
EDIT:
Ayy so any updates on that calculator thing? :v
Might as well mention the specific status of what we currently have.
The basic import/create/export characters and their stats bits work great. If you want to fill in stats for your character and give them a set of weapons and then click through the dropdowns calling them and seeing their stats appear in different boxes, we got you. There are two major problems from there.
The first and by far pettier issue is that I've stalled in creating what I'm calling the "team editor." Basically, there's no way to delete characters or teams within the program. This can be done manually by deleting JSON code, but that's a little unprofessional and obnoxious. So I've been "working" on a lower section of the page to handle selecting individual characters or teams (that is, characters whose "team" field matches the one you've selected), and then deleting or leveling them up.
I probably shouldn't have gone off faffing about with extras like "remove enemies once the map is over with one button click" while the battle calculator still doesn't calculate battles, but I thought getting the levelup feature in there would be worth it, because everyone says leveling is stupidly tedious, but it's also stupidly simple, and that is
exactly the kind of thing you should have robots doing for you.
Anyway, the other and more serious issue is that the battle calculator doesn't calculate battles. This is complicated by the fact that we were going to keep battle scripts separate from stat calculating/storage/display scripts, but that means battle scripts can't access the main script's variables, which means we need to store anything the battle calcs needs on the page. This is far from impossible (hidden page elements are a thing) but figuring out how to store and process it all is a little frazzling. Plus then we have to call some other script to update HP/QL values afterwards, which adds another layer of Maybe I Should Play Crusader Kings II And Work On This In Just A Moment.
It's also, like most of this project, inhibited somewhat by the fact that FEF is just
brimming with weird exceptions, which means every single thing we do involves at least a brief pause to wonder whether we're going to handle that one special case where axes deal magic damage using speed as its damage attribute on a reversed weapon triangle.