User blog:Kain McBride/Monsterpedia vs Side Story Editor

Alright, so I've been talking about a MonsterPedia and there's been some interest. I know it'd be a useful tool to be able to look up all the images by name throughout the game. The issue that I have is that some of the images are missing from mine apparently..? not sure if this is a problem other's have had or not, coming across the screen 'vore scene skipped' or 'whatever scene skipped' but, essentially that's fired when an image is missing (if it's coded to check to see if the image is there or not, otherwise it just crashes)

That said, the Monsterpedia is almost finished. There are around 1000 images left to add to it before it's complete (sounds like a lot, not really that bad though... it's more figuring out what image is what that takes a while...) Once I've finished adding them all, it'll be in a format that I can use with the side story editor I'm working on. Unfortunately, this was a step I needed to complete before I continued working on it. There's a lot left to write, and I've still not quite figured out everything that's possible in a side story (there are 4 commands that I've not added to the documentation yet, but they're all battle related).

So what's next is the real question. Do I continue working on the side story editor, then release the whole thing at once, or do I create some form of displaying the monsterpedia data without the editor, that can then be used by people who need it to create a side story on their own - without an editor..? See, dilema... A monsterpedia would really be helpful enough for creating a side story, but a full blown editor is much more fun... Anyway, this is the problem I'm dealing with presently... Give me some feedback and help me decide what to do.

Data entry is finally complete, I even set up a few methods of data output to make it readable without using the actual monsterpedia data entry program... The text dump version is huge and unwieldy, though functional in that you could in theory use it for what you wanted to... The HTML Dump version was pretty interesting in that it was much easier to navigate... The major issues I have with the html version is that in order to do an image preview I have to include the image files 'somewhere'... which poses a problem of it's own... it's huge! Currently I'm working on a side story version of the monster pedia, which can be viewed through the game itself, there by not requiring any images / sounds to be attached to the story / monsterpedia... which makes it a lot easier to distribute, though functionality is somewhat limited in that you have to navigate through the damn thing without a full database type interface... For now I think I'm going to accept that and let people go through it, if they want to speed it up you can look at the source files because all the image names are referenced there anyway... :) Anyway, another blog post of mine is about the side story monsterpedia, you can look at it for more information... currently I've only got the background section finished, but it works really well and looks fairly nice... There are some resource files included with it because referencing background images as sprites is, well, not really an option... Will keep you posted... :)

Kain McBride ... Leprichaun...