Re: beginners guide to coding nodes?
I know this thread's about a month old, but I figured this is the best place to ask.
David, I'm also a node coder who limits himself to working exclusively in the gametree, getting back to OpenRPG after a couple of years off. (Been using OpenRPG since about 1.4, my HTML is competent, my Python rudimentary; I just figure that by working with Design instead of hard-coding it, I can get something that'll work everywhere.) I had a few thousand downloads of my assorted character sheets on RPGSheets back when that was up, and I still find variations available on RPGLife and VirtualAdept. The only example I have sitting around right now was last modified in 1.7.7 and developed for St*r W*rs S*g*, but it was based off of an earlier 3.5 sheet (which included psionics and Tome of Battle support; the ToB support evolved into how the sheet handles force powers, and could also tackle 4e with a bit of tweaking). It has rudimentary autocalculation, but no automatic updating. For better or worse, it's available
here. (To run multiple instances of it in one gametree, do a find-and-replace on "CS_". Nested references (i.e. !@Name::Abilities@!) used to work, but seemed hit-and-miss, so I had to use this workaround. A cut-down version of that was used for NPCs.)
(For what it's worth, this sheet does everything that Smoothbore wanted except manage ammunition. We tracked that using a modified game status controller plugin with extra fields.)
I'm having trouble finding documentation for how to use the sheet you linked to, as well as how exactly that was created. It looks like it's designed to add context-menus to a mini, which I thought was impossible in OpenRPG (doesn't appear to be listed in any of the changelogs since 1.7.7, the last version I seriously played with). There's other features present - such as using a !@REFNAME@! to refer to something other than a text box, and updating fields in a table based on chat /commands - that I'm totally unfamiliar with, and don't know where to look up more info on. I learned all my advanced node coding by playing around with Design and reading the WrathOf website, but the former isn't documented and the latter's woefully out of date.
If you're still reading this, could you help a guy out and point him to where he could find this info? I'm interested in writing up more advanced nodes for our games, and I'll be quite willing to share them (and even write plain-English tutorials) if people want.