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RE: wacky XML

• To: 'Ben Trafford' <ben@p...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: wacky XML
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2004 17:06:45 -0600

That would be my contribution too.  I spent part of the holidays
working with my son and a Quake engine level editor.   It also 
dumps a mediocre XML format (DTD provided but wow, a microparsing 
dream).  The game industry today is a redux of the music industry 
of twenty years ago because sharing behavioral models among 
proprietary engines is not very successful (BTW, Simon, this 
is where your theories about semanticless XML go south) and 
sharing geometry has not been something in great demand given 
the user base demographics.  With the very high price of games, 
there is also no vendor incentive to pursue interoperability 
(The case for global interoperation of systems based on 
XML is still weak in general).

So this factors into the work being done on the web's 
3D format, X3D.  It is simple to provide runtimeless 
formats for games, but not very powerful or even very useful 
which is why most of these I've seen so far are exporting 
and importing into their own XML formats.

On the other hand, those level editors are often free, 
12 to 14 year olds master them in a day and are off building 
3D content, and there is a significant opportunity for 
standardization with all of the usual attendant effects if 
what one desires is longer lifecycles for the content, sharing 
among different systems and all the usual reasons for 
implementing XML-based systems.  It just won't come from 
the currrent game vendors any time real soon now.  

HTML didn't emerge from WYSIWYG publishing vendors.

Thanks for the URL to the herogames site, Ben.  That is most helpful.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Trafford [mailto:ben@p...]

At 05:22 PM 1/6/2004 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

>Outrageous is fun, practical is fine, but off the beaten path would be
>appreciated.

         Hero Games (http://www.herogames.com) uses an RPG character 
creation program called "Hero Designer." For anyone who is familiar with 
roleplaying games, their system is very math-heavy, and extremely detailed.

         The program saves all files as XML -- not the prettiest XML ever, 
but it is both well-formed and validates to a DTD. In addition, they use an 
XML-style template system for exporting character files and setting up 
house rules. Basically, all data going in and out of their system is XML.

         It currently includes a "Save as version 1" option (they're at 
version 2, now). I wrote the XSLT stylesheet that converts the character 
sheets from version 2 to version 1. It's neat stuff. I'm in the process of 
writing a PDF output filter for the program, using FOP.

         So you can add "I save my geeky RPG characters as XML."

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