Wrapped up the last of my classwork for the semester on Friday, and I'm only taking two classes over the summer. If I don't end up finding a job, I'm likely to have a fair amount of free time, so it seemed like a good time to jump back into this.
Today I added a 'CharacterDB' Class to read and write characters from and to XML. Nothing else is built yet, so I don't have a way to test out the XML functionality yet, but the code looks right so far. The trickiest part was building the reader to read sub-tags into Lists of Skills, Talents, Critical Injuries and Weapons (each of which is a separate Class). For this build, I will aim to only have one custom Skill field. I'll add the Skills controls through code (rather than drag and drop), and I can group by category. This will allow me to keep everything slightly more compact and not have to display unused custom Skills (this concept would also be extensible to other things like critical injuries and weapons). The XML file should be tagged clearly enough that it could be edited outside of the program somewhat intuitively.
On the primary 'Character' Class, I changed all of my arrays to Lists. This will allow me to get rid of all of the null data I had been saving (custom skills, unused talents, etc.). Also, I kind of like Lists.
I should probably add something here.