Skip to main content

Hoardomatic Client


I put together a simple interface for the hoard-building machinery as an alternative to running the code manually in Eclipse. Pretty simple: enter a target value for the hoard and press the button.


To customize the output, there's a collapsible section of checkboxes. Various flags can be thrown for items in the hoard. "Required" means that items must be of that type. "Forbidden" means that items of that type are automatically rejected.


The machinery does it's bit and puts the items in the text box at the bottom, from which they can be copied to something more legible. Just to make sure it's working, there's a little display of the value of the items in the hoard (not including coinage) which updates as it goes.


More or less functional, but it really shows where the limitations of the approach I took (purely random items accepted or rejected after generation, data in XML files). Notably, selecting a small number of required embellishments and any number of forbidden ones (for example, non-enchanted swords) makes it slow to a crawl because only a fraction of generated items are likely to fit the required conditions and those have a non-trivial chance of then meeting the requirements for rejection. And, of course, the real limitation here is tagging the items, for which I need to come up with a better approach.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

More Nattering About Writing Historical RPGs

omeone made the mistake of asking me to expand on some things I'd said about writing historical rpg material, so you all must suffer for it. I write a lot of historical rpg stuff as well as entirely fictional setting material. So why make historically themed games rather than just making stuff up? Well, because it's an effective way of achieving the purpose of writing settings and adventures in general. The purpose of settings and adventures, I would aver, is to give players things to do in a convincing context. Convincing context doesn't necessarily mean realism. Players have different levels of understanding of what's "realistic" in different situations and are more or less sensitive to how closely those situations adhere to reality. For example, I'm a history and culture guy. Put me in SF campaigns (which happens with some regularity) and the specifics of how reaction drives, orbital mechanics, and subatomic physics work entirely escape me. I don't,...

Briefly, How To Play GURPS

For a long time, I’ve maintained that GURPS, despite its reputation for complexity, is actually pretty simple in play. I was thinking recently that I should see if I can express the fundamentals of playing GURPS in a short, easily digested form, and so here I am.   This does not address a more general “how to play rpgs” for those who know nothing on the topic. How to approach GURPS, at that level, isn’t necessarily a lot different from how to approach D&D or TFT or any other RPG system. It doesn’t get into optional and campaign-specific sets of rules or equipment. Rather, this is stuff applicable to playing GURPS no matter what the campaign is. It also doesn’t address how to build GURPS characters, which is a vastly more complicated topic. Rather, this is about how to engage GURPS rules when you’ve already got your character sheet and are sitting at the table to play. It’s a trifle over 1000 words, which I think isn’t too bad.   How To Play GURPS Most of what you’ll need t...

Stuff I Wouldn't Do With Purchased Minis

One of the great things about the advent of 3d printing, when it comes to gaming, is that it allows me to take more risks and try stuff I wouldn't do otherwise. Take, for example, experimenting with painting techniques. Maybe I want to see what an unusual color scheme would look like or try doing an odd way of achieving an effect. Factory-made miniatures are expensive. Too expensive for me to risk it. Which, as someone who's not very good at painting minis and needs lots of practice, is one reason I've never gotten into them. I don't feel like I can afford the implied expense of getting better. Enter 3d printing. With the right files, I can print as many minis as I can like and mess around with them to my heart's content. Mess one up? That's fine. Resin isn't cheap , but it doesn't cost nearly as much as pre-made molded plastic. I can take it as a learning experience and move on. Which brings me to messing around with some Car Wars minis. I'd been m...