Statblock Output (Savage)

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

Overview

Most game systems have a standard format for presenting a character in a relatively compact, text-only format. The more commonly used term for this format is a "statblock". You'll find NPCs and monsters generally presented using this format within the various rulebooks. Savage Worlds has such a format, so we'll now make sure that we generate the appropriate output.

The Game Plan

The statblock format we'll use for Savage Worlds can be found in the Bestiary section of the core rulebook. It's a simple text format that makes use of bold text for important names. While most creatures in the Bestiary don't possess any gear, there are a few that do. We'll be using the way those entries are formatted as a guideline for how we should be synthesizing our statblock output.

All statblock output is generated via a Synthesize script within a "dossier" element. We're going to start with the statblock that is provided by the Skeleton data files. This starting point can be readily adapted for our purposes with Savage Worlds. It can be found within the file "out_statblock.dat", which also includes a number of procedures that are called directly from the Synthesize script.

How Output Works

As mentioned above, text output is generated via a Synthesize script. Since text output is really just a single big stream of text, it's very clunky to require the author to keep remembering to append data to a string variable. It's also very inefficient from a scripting standpoint. Consequently, the Kit provides a special mechanism that is is specific to text output. The text being synthesized is managed internally by HL and the "append" statement allows the author to easily tack more material onto the end of the output. This results in a simplified process for authors, although it also requires the output be generated in a serialized fashion.

The general mechanism is designed to support various different types of output, including plain text, HTML, and BBCode. In order to make this easy for authors, there are a number of different special symbols that are pre-defined by the Kit. Based on the output format chosen by the user, these symbols map to the appropriate codes for that format. For example, the "@boldon" symbol is used to enable bold text within the output. When the user selects HTML output, this symbol maps to "{b}", while it is empty for plain text output. This allows authors to synthesize the output once and let HL do the work of tailoring it to the appropriate format.

The following sequence of script code will output a series of attributes as text, where each is listed on a new line, the name of the field is in bold, and the description is not.

foreach pick in hero where "component.Attribute"
  append @boldon & eachpick.field[name].text & @boldoff
  append ": " & eachpick.field[description]
  append @newline
  nexteach