Character Generator Designer, it lives!

I have not posted any updates in a while because I did not have anything interesting to post. I've been heads down in the character generator designer redesign and coding whenever I had time to work on it. The redesign took longer than expected, but I am extremely happy with the new look. You will also notice a lot of other design changes in the new screenshot. Those occured here and there between the last time I posted screenshots and now. I am constantly experimenting with the look and feel whenever I need a break from a complicated piece I am working on. It gives me a break and lets me refocus on the problem at hand. This strategy has worked well for me, though it does consume more time I find it rewarding.

Onto the screenshot. It is a bit large, I wanted to get all the goodies into the single shot. The editing is now done inline thoughout the character generator designer, and soon the rest of the application. The inline editing is a bit more natural for a web application and looks a lot better than having input controls all over the screen which makes it look both confusing and ugly.

The Configuration area as well as the action hooks are expandable and in fact start out collapsed. I expanded them for the screen shot. You click on the field you want to edit and the inline editor pops up. The screenshot has only one step, but you can have as many as you wish and to sort them, you drag and drop them (a new component I built). As you can see, the flow of the page looks pretty natural, is clean and easy to read.

The hooks are composed of actions, same actions you already defined in the rule editor and here you just select the one you want to add, and configure the properties. All actions from the rule engine are available, though some would not really be useful, they are still available and editable in the single place (the rule editor).