Hero Lab night three

Big thanks to TatteredKing on the WolfLair forums for sending me his work on the Realms of Cthulhu Hero Lab files, it's been really useful to see what he's been doing and check if I'm doing things right.... Judging from the various datafiles that I've had a poke through so far, there really is no way to create new equipment titles. That makes me much happier with the progress on the A!C file so far. The only thing left to do is clean up the equipment list a bit as the Three Kings adventure book doesn't contain loads of the equipment information, like ammo types, weight and costs. Ammo is easy enough to fix with this here interwebz and we can mark the cost for everything as Military to get around that one... this leaves weight. I'll probably best guess this one and then check with Modiphius to see if they have any better ideas.

Thinking about some other equipment limitations that I could put in place.

1) Adding equipment sources for Allied and German would allow us to filter out German weapons when creating an allied character (and the other way around)

2) Trying to ad an option in that hides more modern equipment...  I just need to work out if I can hide anything that is Modern, but not in one of the Achtung Cthulhu sources... that should be possible as I've seen lines of code to hide skills and spells.

The most recent thing I've learned tonight is that if you hand code the data file, you can add comments in. If you use the built in editor it strips them all out again.... *Grrrrr*

While I was fiddling around with scripts, I added one item from Heroes of the Sea. In here, it adds the free skill Dreaming to everyone's character. For now I've set this up as a global bootstrap (add-on) so that every Achtung! Cthulhu character gets Dreaming at d4 for free if they have the Heroes of the Sea book selected as a valid source. If it becomes a global skill for all A!C books, or at least for some, I can add more usersources, or change it to the global Achtung! Cthulhu grouping so that any book allows it.

To add the skill for free, first we need to create our new skill, either through the admin interface, or in the .user file.

   <thing id="skACDream" name="Dreaming" description=" Brief description..." compset="Skill">
    <usesource source="ACHotS"/>
    <link linkage="attribute" thing="attrSpi"/>
    </thing>

We need to give it a unique ID, as usual, along with the name and description. Simple enough so far. The compset defines this as a skill and with the <link linkage... /> item we're assigning this to Spirit for now. The adventure doesn't specify, but the editor seems to want it linked to an attribute and Spirit seemed to make most sense. This one needs double checking with Modiphius at some point.

Ok, so now anyone can pick the skill, but we want everyone to get it for free. As far as I can work out (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong) I need to create a setting adjustment

    <evalrule phase="Initialize" message="Free Dreamer skill"><![CDATA[
if (hero.tagis[source.ACHotS] <> 0) then
perform #resspent[resSkill,-,1,"Free Dreamer"]
endif]]>
</evalrule>

In this setting adjustment we're adding a bootstrap line of skACDream, which is out Dreamer skill (skACDream) we created earlier. This will only apply to the character if we're in the Heroes of the Sea setting as the skill only exists here.  The evaluation rule then checks to see if we're using the Heroes of the Sea options. If we are, we reduce the  spent skill points by 1 to counteract us having just added a skill to the character upon creation. *TaDa!* Free skill only for someone using the source ACHotS.