View Single Post
Old 04-01-2011, 01:33 PM   #29
bigtrouble77
Minors (Double A)
 
bigtrouble77's Avatar
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 125
Cobra, I highly recommend that you don't try to build the sim part now. Just building a basic management system will be challenging enough. As you learn more, you will make many decisions that you will regret later on. As a result, you should keep things simple and focused to start.

With that said, I had the same consideration as you... should I create a management utility around TBCB and just throw out my spreadsheets, or should I build the fight simulator from the ground up? The first huge issue is that TBCB doesn't seem to have many features to integrate well with external utilities with the exception of the xml export capabilities.

There's no way, that I know of, to initiate a fight from the command line which produces xml results. If you had that feature you would be golden. The only alternative is to do it manually- just use the one-off sim feature to simulate fights. This creates a massive amount of micro-management as the TBCB scheduler has been obsoleted. One way to mitigate this micro-management is to have the management app automate scanning of the project directory and parse all fight xml docs that exist.

I don't have TBCB installed at the moment (horrific drm is blocking me now), but I'll check and see if it has the ability to import fight schedules when I get the install sorted out. If it can, then you could just follow the TBCB DTD and generate a fight schedule xml in the management app and import in TBCB. Again, I have to get it installed to see for sure.

I also wanted to throw something else out there... This type of app really should follow idiomatic object oriented design. That would allow you to adopt the TBCB simulator in the beginning and then phase it out later on. I would strongly recommend separating the simulation data from the rest of app so the data models aren't intertwined.

I don't want to get too deep into advanced topics, but the reality is to expect the first attempt at this to a throwaway version. Just try and get something out there that is useful and then try and build something more sustainable once that's under your belt.

In the next few weeks I'll try and throw a web app up on github with some of the concepts I talked about here. I just need to get some xml fight exports to process.

Last edited by bigtrouble77; 04-01-2011 at 01:34 PM.
bigtrouble77 is offline   Reply With Quote