Re: The quest for Babylon 5

On Sat, Jun 28, 2003 at 07:55:24AM -0400, Nyrath the nearly wise wrote:

>Question: are the ship description format wars over yet?
>I've found two different web pages describing the format
>of two incompatible ascii descriptions of a FT ship,
>not counting the XML format used by FTJava.
>Is there an accepted standard?

Nope.

But anything vaguely machine-parseable is good. FTJava XML has the
problem that weapons that aren't yet in the game aren't defined, and of
course it's bulky. My new shiptools program produces output like:

ShipClass; mass=34; race=Human; navy=FSE; classif=Destroyer;
classifcode=DD; class=Albacora; designer=Mark Kochte; namelist=; notes=
MainDrive; thrust=6; shipmass=34
Armour; boxes=2
FCS
PDS
PDS
PDS
PDS
BeamBattery; class=3; arcs=F
FTLDrive; tow=0; shipmass=34
Hull; boxes=10; rows=4; standard=Average; shipmass=34

but that's not exactly "human-readable".

Roger