Prune Extraneous Material (Savage)

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

Overview

Now is an excellent time to do a little cleaning up of our data files. This is something that you should get in the habit of doing on an ongoing basis as you develop your data files. The Skeleton data files contain pieces that you won't need for your game system, and these need to be disposed of. It's often easier to do it along the way as opposed to leaving everything for one major cleanup at the end. You'll still have some final cleanup to do, but it won't be as much work if you do some of it along the way. In addition, if you don't clean things up, your data files will be unnecessarily harder to maintain, so we recommend you keep your data files cleaned up.

Delete Extraneous Files

The Skeleton data files included the "thing_abilities.dat" file, but we won't be using it anywhere within the Savage Worlds files. So we can simply delete it.

Delete Abandoned Mechanics

Take a look at the various core mechanisms that were provided by the Skeleton files and see if there are fields, scripts, things, tags, or anything else that won't be needed for your game system. If you find something, you can delete it. However, we recommend that you don't actually delete something immediately. Instead, try commenting it out and re-compiling the data files. This will uncover all of the places that rely on the item you want to delete. You can continue this process of commenting out pieces until the data files re-compile, re-load, and work exactly as they did before. Once you know that you can safely delete something, so can then do so. By using this technique, you'll avoid inadvertently deleting something that has dependency tendrils into other places that will be difficult to untangle, deferring such cases until later.

Let's start by deleting a few things. It's easiest to delete things, since they are usually the least likely to have other mechanisms that are dependent upon them. The Skeleton files include a number of derived traits that are not used within Savage Worlds, so we should delete them. Open the file "thing_traits.dat" and locate the "Resistance" trait. Comment it out, then re-compile the data files. Everything works fine, so we know nothing is dependent on the trait, and it can be properly deleted. Now try commenting out the "Power Points" traits and re-compiling. Errors are reported that you can chase down now, or you can defer this thing until later. It's easiest to defer it until later, so remove the comments and restore the thing. The same problem applies to the "Defense" and "Initiative" derived traits, so just leave them alone for now and we'll deal with them later.

Looking at the "Actor" component, there are two fields that are of no use for Savage Worlds: the starting character points and starting ability slots. Commenting them out and re-compiling uncovers that there are two resources that rely on the fields. Commenting out the two resources and re-compiling reveals that there are lots of places where the resources are referenced. So we should probably put everything back the way it was and hold off deleting these fields until later - after we've had a chance to re-work more of the data files for Savage Worlds and eliminate those existing dependencies.

Aside from the fields and resources identified above, a quick scan doesn't reveal anything that is clearly unused. There are some facets of equipment that will be different for Savage Worlds, but we haven't converted any of that yet, so it's premature to start cleaning that up. We'll leave things as they are for now and do further cleanup passes after we get more of the conversion completed.