DEPRECATION NOTICE

Proposed approach was adopted by official TWDA repository, so this repo is not required anymore and archived.

neoTWDA

neoTWDA is a set of utilities to generate static TWDA (Tournament Winning Decks Archive) pages from separate deck files for Vampire the Eternal Struggle (VTES) collectible card game.

OLD (CURRENT) APPROACH

Existing TWDA is maintained (updated with new TWDs) by editing single html file in TWDA repository which later served to the public.

PROBLEMS WITH CURRENT APPROACH

Target file is very big (hundreds of thousand lines) which is not very convenient to edit/navigate
Editing require manual ordering by date
Require manual Table of Content creation
Relatively high bar of technical knowledge for contribution as each new deck addition requires at least to get html file from git and then careful edit it
Prone to human errors like typos in html tags
Prone to duplications (especially when several people commit addition of same deck)
No simple way of changing styles (including not only visual, but also the structure of the document or deck representation)
No simple way of generating Hall of Fame

PROPOSED SOLUTION (AS IN neoTWDA)

Each deck is stored as txt file of already established human-readable twd format (in ./decks folder)
Static files generated by running two script (create_twd_html.py and create_hall_of_fame_html.py) which uses deck files to create main part of the documents, and adds html header/footer from static files (twd_html_header.txt, twd_html_footer.txt, hall_of_fame_header.txt and hall_of_fame_footer.txt)

DECK FILE FORMAT

File name must be event id. First 6 lines order (Event...Player) is important, as their values used for ToC generation. The rest may be in arbitrary order/style (i.e. script will reuse it as-is[1] just like plain text - this allows custom style like author card comments in deck list).

[1] Except text wrapping up to STRING_LIMIT from create_twd_html.py which allows both one-long-line descriptions in deck file as well as pre-trimmed lines.

HOW TO ADD NEW DECK

Put deck file event-id.txt file into ./decks
Re-run python create_twd_html.py

Similar works to edit/delete the deck.

WHERE TO GET DECK FILE

Deck files are standard txt files, so 'simplest' (not easiest!) way is to type it in your favorite text editor
Deck-building software (Amaranth, VDB, etc) can to export deck to Text or TWD format, then edit header fields (Event, Date, etc) in text editor.
To help verify deck file integrity it is possible to use VDB Check TWD page (under construction, not fully working yet), but it's not mandatory and approach designed to avoid any format/vendor-locking and to be plain-text-driven.
Final entry (with filled fields) could then be attached as file to TWD Report post in the forum or pasted as text, and is ready to be add to TWD with minimal overhead for TWDA maintainers.

REQUIREMENTS

Python (v3.10+)

INSTALLATION

    git clone https://github.com/smeea/neoTWDA.git
    cd neoTWDA
    python -m venv venv
    source venv/bin/activate
    python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

    python create_twd_html.py // TO GENERATE NEW TWD.HTM
    python create_hall_of_fame_html.py // TO GENERATE NEW HALL_OF_FAME.HTM

EXAMPLE

Hosted examples of generated static html from the repo: