New weapons help document & HTML template

[ColdSteel]

I have what I think is a pretty good idea. Why not write a program that builds a HTML document template and then parses the existing SE4 data files for information on weapons components and fills in the template information in dynamic fashion?

There are quite a few Quake log file parsers that do exactly this (AEStats for one) and they work great. The advantage to this approach is that all you have to do to update this help document when a new patch comes out is re-run the program and regenerate the HTML based on the very Lastest info contained in the text files. No more wondering what changes were made to which weapons. It would always be up to date.

In addition, you can use existing game graphics to include pictures of each weapon and component along with their stats. Looks spiffy.

I have constructed just such a sample HTML document template that contains only the Anti-proton Beam weapon entry, just so everyone can see what I mean. It's attached here to take look at. Just copy it to your SE4 "Manual" subdirectory so it knows where to find the graphics for the game. Also make sure it has a .html extension on the filename.

A really good language to do this project in would be Perl but it requires you to have Perl installed on your PC to run the program so that's no good. C++ might by kind of clunky.

Are there any programmers out there that might be interested in taking this on as a project? It could well be extended beyond just the weapons to all components if desired. I think this would be of great benefit to the SE4 community. Once you get the HTML template coded, the rest is pretty trivial programming.

So what do you all think?