[caption id=“attachment_252” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Another early preview screen with the import dialog running”]
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Thanks in large part to Pat Lynch and is DDMWarbandTool, Skirmisher now has a complete database of miniature card data and images for both the cards and the figures themselves! So if you haven’t yet, go check out his great tool (will require Windows/.NET though) and give him some kudos for his hard work. It’s much deserved!
My recent work has been to integrate the data import into the Skirmisher application interface. This will allow me to distribute the application without the data in order to avoid all of my previous concerns and allow end users to import the data without resorting to running my scripts manually at the command line. When all is said and done it should work on all the major desktop OS platforms out there.
The new database is nice! It now covers all of the sets and includes all of the card images. The data is finely grained and probably can’t get much better. I’m really happy with it.
I guess that’s it for now. I might follow up on this post with a technical article on working with python, GTK, and specifically progress bars. Getting past that part was a bit of a hurdle because there were so many choices and the documentation one can find on the Internet is pretty sparse. My future plans for Skirmisher include some UI improvements, a preferences panel, PDF generation (for printing out war bands), and finally… the game.
I’ll leave you with a bit of a teaser: I’ve been working on a game engine. Originally just a state tracker for a single player on the table, I’ve found that it’s pretty trivial to track multiple players on the table. This in turn became a rather crude game engine for playing DDM skirmishes on my computer. I hope to expand it out into a full system with maps, network code, and the whole nine yards. Though no word yet on when I’ll even have an alpha demo available any time soon…