Suggestion: computer-readable data

[PhilB]

There are many, many tables and lists of data in the BBB. I've seen lots of threads mentioning people building various generators (I too have tinkered with character generation in a Java program). However, the data in the BBB isn't readily usable.

Would it be possible to have this data in (say) XML format?

Alternatively, would it be acceptable if others produced this data?

 

[Original_Carl]

I'm a C# guy so XML would be interesting for some of the game data.

I started with a homeworld generator and then moved on to a subsector generator -- these were both under Beta, and I haven't updated them yet. Character generation is much more complex than system generation, so that wouldn't be my first choice.

Originally, I wrote a tool that took text and XML-ified it. Then I moved to SQLite (http://sqlite.org/), converted the XML to tables and never worried about it again.

The problems I ran into with homeworld generation and moreso in subsector generation were large series of nested IF-ELSE blocks to deal with things like trade codes and the UPP.