b206

* Bug Fixes

When reading a book file, if the last character of content in the file was a line-continuation character, GCA could get stuck in an infinite loop. Fixed.

* Options dialog

In the Characters box, the option ‘Show all status messages when processing templates’ makes more sense as a book-processing option since the output is for debugging. That option has been moved to the Book Processing box.

* Metric and Unit Conversions

Since GCA attempts to perform automatic unit conversions when various values are in standard/metric and the character is set to the other, checking or unchecking the Metric checkbox on the General Information box should trigger a character recalculation so that items can be converted to match the new setting. That will now happen.

Previously, GCA’s automatic unit conversions only used the Game Metric values (p. B9). GCA now supports either Game Metric or Real Metric (p. B9). Game Metric uses simpler, ‘close-enough’ conversion constants while Real Metric uses more exact conversion constants (to 3 decimal places). This support is GCA-specific, not character-specific, so all loaded characters use the same conversion values.

You can change GCA between the available sets of conversion constants in the new Unit Auto-Conversions box in Options. This box also offers the option of turning automatic conversion off, and leaving units and values alone. Some traits have unit conversion built into their calculations, and these will still calculate themselves based on the Metric setting regardless of your setting for Unit Auto-Conversions.

* Per-Die result caps

You can now cap the results returned by the functions that return the dice for base swing (@baseswdice) and base thrust (@basethdice) damage. I believe the recommended dice cap is 7; any positive integer value is allowed. These functions are primarily used for giving per-die bonuses to Boxing, Brawling, and karate, but would also affect Weapon Master damage bonuses or any other such usages.

There are now default character options and character options to set these, in the respective Rules boxes.

Because these are new options settings that can be set by files, also, the FastLoad file version has been changed, and FastLoad files will be rebuilt. The book file settings are “CapDamageBonusPerDie=True” to turn capping on, and “CapDamageBonusPerDieAtXDice=X”, where X is the cap to set (default is 7).

These settings are now also included in Build Campaign Book.

* Appearance / Biographical Data

The Appearance dialog has been updated, and it is now called Appearance / Biographical Data. The updated dialog now has two tabs: Appearance, which contains everything from the existing dialog; and Biographical Data, which contains a grid of biographical data fields. The Biographical Data tab also includes everything from the Appearance tab, so if you prefer it, you can simply use this tab and won’t have to switch between them.

Biographical data includes a bunch of possible default fields which you can use. All of these are stored in the character’s tags (except for those fields also on the Appearance tab, which have custom data slots on the character). The character will also get a tag called ‘biodatacontrols’, which tracks what all of these tags are, whether they are visible, and what prompt is shown to the user if it isn’t the same as the tag name (which is the case for most of them since this system uses tag names such as ‘bio_dob’ for ‘Date of Birth’ and ‘bio_family’ for ‘Family’).

You can rearrange the order of entries on the grid using drag-and-drop. You can hide fields you have no interest in using the right-click menu. If you change your mind, you can also use Show Hidden on the right-click menu to see the hidden items, then select them and pick Show to unhide them.

I’ll probably also add the ability to create new fields to include here, but that’ll require another dialog for tag names and prompts and such, so probably not right away.

The defaults are currently created by GCA, but the show/hide settings are per-character. There’s currently no way to universally hide any of the fields to make them hidden by default on new characters.