Miscellaneous Cleanup (Savage)

Context: HL Kit … Authoring Examples … Savage Worlds Walk-Through 

Overview

Based on our status assessment, we've got a lot of little things to tweak, so we might as well get them all handled and removed from our list.

Power Points Tracker

The "Power Points" tracker is always appearing on the "In-Play" tab, regardless of whether the character possesses an arcane background. We need to ensure that it only appears when a suitable arcane background is possessed. That would be any arcane background except for "Weird Science", since gizmos each have their own power points to be tracked.

There are three steps in applying this fix. The first is to modify the "ipTracker" portal that shows trackers to use a List tag expression. The Skeleton files pre-define a "Hide.Tracker" tag that we can use, so we change the tag expression to exclude any trackers that are expressly hidden.

The second step is to assign the "Hide.Tracker" tag to the "trkPower" thing. This will ensure that the tracker never appears in the table unless we specifically make it visible. We can make it visible by deleting the tag.

The final step is to modify the "Arcane" component to delete the tag. Since we want to delete the tag for all arcane backgrounds, we'll delete the tag within an Eval script on the component. That way, all arcane backgrounds inherit the behavior. We actually want to suppress the tracker for the "Weird Science" background, which we can identify via the "Arcane.WeirdSci" tag, so we'll have a special exception. This results in the script below.

<eval index="3" phase="Render" priority="5000"><![CDATA[
  if (tagis[Arcane.WeirdSci] = 0) then
    perform hero.child[trkPower].delete[Hide.Tracker]
    endif
  ]]></eval>

The tracker should now be hidden unless an appropriate arcane background is selected.

Abilities on "Special" Tab

The "Special" tab contains a list of all facets of the character that are designated for inclusion on the tab. After the name of an entry, the nature of that entry is shown within parentheses. For the various special abilities, they show two different natures. For example, edges will show both "Edge" and "Ability", while hindrances will show both "Hindrance" and "Ability". They should only be showing a single nature, and the "Ability" designation is extraneous.

If we take a look at the way the "Special" tab contents are handled, there is a "source" portal within the template. This portal uses the "tagnames" target reference and requests all tags belonging to the "SpecialTab" tag group. So the problem is that all of our abilities are being assigned two different "SpecialTab" tags.

When we modified the "Ability" component to be shared among the three different component sets (edges, hindrances, and racial abilities), we overlooked this behavior. Since the "Ability" component is shared, it should not possess its own "SpecialTab" tag. So the solution is to delete the "SpecialTab.Ability" tag from the file "tags.1st" and then modify the "Ability" component to no longer possess the tag. Once we make these two changes, abilities on the "Special" tab appear with only a single nature associated.