Army Builder

Army Builder is the (unoriginally titled) army builder application from Lone Wolf Development. It is a paid-for, closed-source program with what is effectively an optional rolling subscription for upgrades. Despite this, it seems to be quite popular in the gaming community. This is probably in part due to the ​large collection of data files that exist for different game systems.

WarFoundry and Army Builder

Being open and created with multiple game systems and file formats in mind, WarFoundry can load data files from any number of different applications as long as they can be mapped to the concepts in WarFoundry. The main example is the Rollcall Plugin, but an Army Builder plugin is also possible. The purpose of this page is to detail what can be done with WarFoundry and Army Builder.

Army Builder - The Files

All of Army Builder's files are a form of XML (albeit what seems to be quite messy XML with lots of what appears to be purely presentational markup within them). These XML files are contained within a .ab file that defines a game system and all of its races. This means two things for WarFoundry:

1. Once we load a single file it will load our Game System and our Races
2. We need to work out what the .ab file format is so that user's don't have to get the pre-extracted versions of the files!

Details of the .ab file format are on the Army Builder File Format page.

Army Builder - The Plugin

Currently there isn't any work being done on a plugin for Army Builder files, but that doesn't mean that there can't be. All that is needed is to understand the .ab file so that we can extract the data files, understand the data files so that we can get the data out of them, then convert that data in to WarFoundry objects.

The Army Builder File Format page is already defining the format of the .ab file, and the data files can be read from any text editor. The only step left is to get people signed up who are interested in importing Army Builder files so that we can get an Army Builder plugin made.