Progress update - Mafia Player-Role List Generator - 7th June

If you read my previous blog post, I am currently making a tool in C++ that allows Mafia GMs to more easily generate their player-lists. Most of the main functionality is finished. I'm making this progress update with some good news, and some (not that bad) bad news.

The bad news is that this progress update is not to announce that the program is finished. I am yet to add RANDOM.ORG generation.

The good news is that I've pretty much finished everything else I wanted to add in the program but the RANDOM.ORG connectivity, which, once I figure it out (well, I'm yet to try), should (hopefully) be very quick to add.

Here's a nice list of added improvements from the prototype I released in the last blog:

• Unaffiliated is now treated properly as its own faction - What this means is that you can have how ever many Unaffiliated roles you want. The program checks if the Unaffiliated role-list file is empty - if it is, it will automatically not have the Unaffiliated faction present.
• Checks are now in place that prevent you from entering a nonsense number of Mafia players - For example, if you have 6 players, with 2 Innocent Special roles and 1 Unaffiliated role, you cannot ask for 4 Mafia players, as this would not work out mathematically. Previously, the program would allow you to enter any number, and if it was invalid, it would be stuck generating the list forever.
• Added faction naming - The program asks you at the start if you would to enter names for the factions: for example "Havenites", "Greens", "Blarzigordians". Of course, you can just enter nothing to go with the default "Innocent", "Mafia", and "Unaffiliated".
• Added the option to save the list with color code tags for each faction and their roles - You know how BB code has [noparse]This text is red[/noparse] to get This text is red? Well, after generating the list, the program will ask you if you'd like to give your factions colors for their names and roles, and you can enter something like "#FF0000" or "red", and have the program add the color tags to each instance of the name. Example: [Mafia] [Leader]
• Added the option to save each list with bold tags for faction and role names - Like above, after generating the program will ask if you'd like to apply bold ([noparse][/noparse]) to your factions names and roles. Example: [Mafia] [Leader]
  [*]Program is now COLORFUL - For no real reason, the program will randomly pick from about 8 different background colors each time it is run. Don't worry, they're all perfectly readable :)
  [*]Added error messages that are slightly more explanatory than the previous version about missing or empty files - Self-explanatory
  

Expect to see all these features in the finished version of the program. And very hopefully, RANDOM.ORG generation alongside them.

-Cosmic