Hit Points

This application allows a person to keep track of "Hit Points" in a role playing type game for multiple players and groups of players.

Hit Points 0.9c

http://muskie.fishnet.com/~cmaahs/PilotDev/

(C)1998, by Christopher J. Maahs

*** GO TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS DOCUMENT FOR A LIST OF CURRENT AND ***

*** FIXED BUGS, AS WELL AS A LIST OF NEW FEATURES FOR THIS RELEASE. ***

What is Hit Points?

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This application allows a person to keep track of "Hit Points" in a

role playing type game for multiple players and groups of players.

How much memory does it use?

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The PRC file for Hit Points is 17K, and each record/player group uses

a maximum of 185 bytes.

How did you make this program?

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As a person who has mostly used Visual Basic I tried everything before

realizing that I would have to learn C. I went to www.roadcoders.com

and www.massena.com/pilot/ and downloaded the ASDK and pilotgcc. I got

a couple of books from a friend. The C Primer from Waite publishing,

and what my friend referred to as the K&R bible of ANSI-C. I downloaded

all of the source code that I could find, the best of which seemed to be

a program called ListDB by Andrew Low (http://www.magma.ca/~roo/) which

had glorious samples of using the different UI resources and saving to

database structures. In about a week of playing and learning I was able

to actually create my first "real" pilot program in C.

How much does Hit Points cost?

-----------------------------

Nothing, it's uses are probably pretty limited. Hopefully someone will

get some use out of it besides me. This seems to be the problem when you

write a program to fit your own needs.

Standard Legal Disclaimer

-------------------------

Hit Points is provided as-is with no warranties expressed or implied. You

use this software at your own risk.

This release of Hit Points has ONLY been tested on a Pilot 5000/Pro Upgrade

running PalmOS 2.0.3 and a Pilot 1000/512K upgrade running PalmOS 1.0.6.

CoPilot testing has been done on the PalmOS 1.0, PalmOS 2.0, and PalmOS 3.0

ROMs. However, CoPilot testing can not quite replace the real thing.

How can I get ahold of you?

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If you have comments or suggestions you can e-mail me at [email protected].

Be aware that I am not planning any future upgrades to this project as it was

really a learning project for myself. As I am quite interested in the Pilot

I will be spending more time writing Pilot based applications. Any

suggestions for new applications are always welcome.

Release History

---------------

7/5/1998 Maintenance Release (0.9c) - I received my Palm III, so testing has

been completed on an actual Pilot. The Pilot 3.0 Debug.ROM file

ran the PRC, but the "real" Pilot hung. This has been fixed.

6/29/1998 Maintenance Release - Low Memory Errors located and eliminated.

6/18/1998 First Release - Probably the last.

Bugs in this release:

- I have learned, but not yet fixed this: During the "Confirm Delete" dialog

for deleting a group, switching away from application caused record to

be deleted, and an exception in the data manager. I guess using "Alerts"

to perform these functions was a bad idea. I thought it was too easy.

- Also used "Alert" type of a resource for allowing current total to exceed

the maximum total. Switching away from the application causes the "Allow"

button to be selected automatically.

- I suspect switching the order in which the buttons are displayed would create

the desired affect, however this seems backwards to me. I'll likely switch to a

form resource to fix both problems.

Limitations in this release:

- Due to space limitations (160X160) and use requirements the CUR / MAX

fields can only display 3 characters. This limits positive values to

999, and negative values to -99. Personally this wasn't a severe

limitation, but thought I should mention it.

Bugs fixed in this release:

- As a first release of an application that I wrote to learn C, and

specifically C for the Pilot, let me assure you that there were plenty

of bugs to be fixed.

New features in this release: (What I learned about Pilot programming)

- I used a table to display the list of group on the main screen.

- I used a "real" pilot database (modeled after Andrew Low's source)

* Thanks again for providing such a robust sample!

- I created a Preferences form, storing the information in the database

header. (This apparently is the right way)

- I found out the hard way that StrAToI does not work on PalmOS 1.x for

converting negative numbers. Of course, I did it the hard way,

to maintain support for the Pilot 1000/5000 users.