Plugins ? Complex? or what?

[Wilfred_Death]

I thought maybe, I'd try some simple PlugIns to, facilitate what I use Hero Designer for:
Fantasy Game with lots of 'Equipment', Sectional Armor, 'Custom Weapons', and Spells.........

I've used XL and VB to 'automatically' make a Prefab for all the Weapons and I'm kinda happy with the result... I used a Template with a 'New Power' to Insert the weapons into......

Sectional armor is kind of stumping me as to how to manage via a template..
So I was thinking of looking into PlugIn writing.....

A couple of things I'd like to try would be:

1. Make an 'Equipment Entry' "Power"
So it would have a 'box' for quantity and the players can say:
Choose from a Prefab, or create : "Holy Symbol" weight .5kg Cost 100 Units
And then Select QTY 10
And then the POWER Text would be updated to have "( QTY 10 )" tagged onto the end, also the Weight would come out as 10 x .5 = 5Kg

2. Make an Armour-Equipment "power'???
That You could enter:
The DEF and Type Of Armour eg. 6 DEF, Chain
the cost in your Game of a Full Suit of That armour Type.
The Location Covered by that Piece of Armour E.g. 3 , Face

Then The Sectional Mass and Sectional Cost of that 'Piece' would be calculated and added to the TEXT.

3. On The 'Reduced Maximum' Range Limitation , have the 'Range Of the Power' show up, like it does on 'Increased Maximum Range'. and then allow the GM to edit that as well, and have the Range go into the TEXT

4. Maybe Instead Of 2, or as well as.
Make some pop-up box, that the Player could enter all the armour DEFS for all their Hit_locations on, and calculate the wieght and costs of those pieces, and add that to any Export File..
I've been reading some of the info on creating PlugIns, also it's been a while since I wrote any Java apps ( Hobby Programmer Only ).
So I was looking for some advice as to whether or not to begin even attampting this.

I've read the source for a HD1 Converter that's available on this forum, and that seems straightforward enough, ( though I'm not great at XML ).

Are these things ( above ) changes to the 'Core Functions' or whatever and thus : "Too difficult"? Or should I start really poring over the JavaDocs ?

[Simon]

1. Certainly possible with a plugin, though you would likely have to "hard code" the Power's rules into the plugin rather than having them read in from the main template (it could be done from the template, but you'd have a fair bit of work and a large performance hit for rather small gain).

2. Also possible with a plugin.

3. The range is not shown by default as there are no rules for determining it other than "what the GM and the player determine" -- if you enter it into either the comments or the display field, it will be shown in the Modifier's text.

4. Tricky. I won't say it's impossible, but it would take some work and some clever coding to chain it off of the regular export process.