[BrainiacVince]

Hey all. I'm planning on trying to write a new spell editor (hopefully with a few nice features) and I'm taking suggestions. I mean no disrespect to the authors of the other spell editors, but they don't seem fully functional and I'm not familiar enough with any of those languages to be of help with the code. So, I'll preface this by telling you that it's going to be done in Java because I don't know any other language well enough to do GUI in it. Also, feature requests may or may not get added, depending on the amount of time it'll take me to code it vs. how useful I think it will be.

I can lay out the gui basically one of two ways (or possibly have both ways as options).
1. The first way will be similar to the two (that I know of, WindCather's and the other's author escapes me atm) existing editors in that it will pre-load a complete list of all the spells from the spell file and have it in a giant selectable list. Beside that will be tabbed panes for different spell options (again, very similar to the existing editors).
2. This way will be similar to how Kayot's DB editor works. Instead of loading the entire list into a window, it will load one spell at a time. It would still most likely load the entire list to memory first, just to make searching more feasible. Loading will most likely be done with a text field near the top that accepts a spell's ID number which then loads the fields into a few tabbed panes for the different spell options.

They aren't that dissimilar, which is why I think that they could both be selectable options, or possibly all in the same layout.

Another option I am considering is having the program create a new DB or a new table in an existing db and loading all of the spells into it. This would require a bit of research on my part, as I am not sure how to do DB connections with Java off the top of my head, but I'm not opposed to learning. This would allow for very nice searching and manipulation of spells, and the data could be read back into the program to be exported as spells_us.txt. The program itself could still be used to edit the spells (this would again require a bit of research for the db editing) or the program could just be used as a gateway between the db and the spells file.



So, let me know what you think, pros, cons, suggestions, anything else you can think of that I may have missed.