Programming Power Brainstorming

Some good discussion over at Tao of D&D about the use of computers and technology in D&D, especially in our post-videogame era. It's gotten me thinking some more about my own attempts to use my computer to speed up play and make things simpler. This post won't actually put anything concrete forward, just some ideas.

So far, I've mostly kept to using Excel. With the Item Durability app, I have begun my first official foray into Android development, with the intention of eventually having a series of inventory sheets for groups of characters which players can adjust and modify at their leisure. Of course, because it's an Android app it's not as available as Excel, which leads me to start considering my other programming options more seriously.

Right now, I am starting a summer job where I will be using XML and Python for some scripting on the web. It's mostly basic backend stuff but it makes me realize the value of these tools as they are fairly universal and beautifully simple to use (Python is so magical straightforward compared to, say, C - albeit because it hides a lot of C's ugliness).

Some ideas:

Movement
Get a GUI of hexes going, create a bunch of labels to represent characters and then move people around on a hex-map. Can be done over the internet to allow real-time updating by players.
- would require some more investigation of GUIs
- I can already make a hex map background (it's really just a fancy 2D array)
- Internet stuff I'd have to just steal what I know from C (which at this point restricts me to console I/O, but hopefully I could snag a domain for this at some point)

Climate
Obviously a major point for any "realistic" adventure in the outdoors. It would be great to have something I can just print the current climate from with a quick shell command, specifying the location and the date.
- seems doable, although I'd either need a big database or a kickass way to download stuff from the web
- if I follow the second option, I can "mask" locations by assigning real-life locations to fantasy ones (what I already do for my world's weather)
- alternatively, I could try to set up a full-on system (dun dun DUN)

Economy
Definitely another big project involving getting access to items controlled by trade routes and such. Would probably pillage the basic concept from my old economic system (itself pillaged from Tao of D&D) and essentially just do all the math for me (yay automating repetitive tasks!)
- would definitely require some databasing, which I kinda suck at (better learn SQL)

Crawler
It would be lovely to have a way to just gather information for my game off the internet for analysis later. I spend so much damn time opening up Wikipedia articles and scanning through less-than-scholarly articles to get a good sense of what I can use for developing my world. This would be a project to speed that up in a simplistic way. I could probably throw together a BATCH file to do it, honestly. All the same, not much of a priority.

Right now, I am hoping to get durability off the ground, but I think I may start on everything else in various stages. Part of what pisses me off with premade stuff is, with all the licensing that goes on, it's only ever made for one or two particular products, when virtually every single DM is going to use slightly different rules. Anything I end up putting online will definitely need to respect the variety of styles and techniques out there, which is why I would want a comprehensive list of settings that can be turned on or off.

Away we go!