Feat Trees

So it turns out that making what is basically a skill tree made of dozens and dozens of skills isn't exactly easy. It's not really hard either but it takes a bit of planning. Like...more than I had done so far. After spending about 10 minutes  in the database manually assigning positions on the tree to various skills, it became pretty obvious that doing things this way wasn't going to work.

So I decided it'd be easier to make a full mock-up of the whole thing first, as close to scale (in terms of things being roughly in the right position relative to each other) as possible. I could worry about what that meant in terms of actual coordinates inside the window later.

A few minutes of googling turned up this site called lucidchart.com. It's apparently an online flow-chart designer, and it actually works pretty well. It was certainly a lot more pleasant to deal with than Microsoft's Visio, which I had used the previous times I had to do something like this. After a couple hours of messing around with it and cross-referencing my game's database and the D&D SRD wiki, I came up with this:

They're ordered roughly based on what level you'd have access to them. Low-level feats at the top, high-level epic feats near the bottom. Beyond that, I divided feats into categories; these are just the ones that I put under "Combat". It's amazing how something this simple gives you a much better idea of how a menu should actually look like. Once I had that, on to actually putting it in the game!

Before that, though, I just found out, completely by accident, that UTF-8 happens to have characters for drawing things. And I just happen to be working on drawing the links between feats inside the feat selection window when this happened. And it turns out that some of the characters are shaped exactly like the icons I wanted to use to display the links in the tree.

So, being the incredibly clever programmer that I am, I came up with this:

Screw figuring out positions for things, I'll just draw all the links (with text) and let the feat window code figure it out. I don't know why, but I find it kind of hilarious that this actually works. After messing around with the icons for a bit so they all line up when you draw them, the feat window now looks like this:

I had to copy/paste a few screenshots to get that (the actual window only displays about a third of that, and you can scroll up or down to see the rest), but you get the idea. I still have to give them proper icons and everything, but it's looking pretty good so far.