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Hi Folks,

I see that AppGameKit is currently on sale via Steam, and I'm interested in purchasing it to remake an app that I made some years ago in a different software that is now no longer supported or updated called Neobook.

My understanding of programming is very basic (we're talking Commodore 64 levels here), but I did manage to make my app work previously.

Rather than being a game, the app is almost like a 'calculator' of sorts, that helps hairstylists correctly formulate their hair colour mixtures.

The UI is simply 2 pull down combo boxes where the hairstylist selects the current hair colour code for their client, and then their desired hair colour code outcome (these lists are populated by looking up the 'haircolour_names' in a column of the table.

Next, behind the scenes, the app looks up unique properties for each hair colour code in the table, such as 'how light or dark it is on a scale of 1-10'.

We then do some maths, e.g. IF $target_colour_shade_lightness => $current_colour_shade_lightness SET $NeedsPeroxide="TRUE" ELSE $NeedsPeroxide="False";

^^^^That type of thing. There are a lot of conditional statements required based on the info about the colour in it's row, which determine which 'results page' the user will be taken to, and the text result that they will read. For example, the printed text might be, "Mix $Weight grams of $Strength peroxide and $ColourAmount grams of $TargetColourShade, then apply to the hair, leaving to develop for $DevelopmentTime mins."

So is this possible to recreate using AppGameKit? If so, which parts of the package would I need to purchase in order to accomplish this?

Many thanks,

Chris

Yes, this is totally possible! All you really need to purchase for this is App Game Kit itself. App Game Kit's tier 1 language is a form of BASIC that's very easy and straightforward.

As far as I know, AppGameKit does not have any commands for reading Access database. There are file system commands, so if you know the format of the database, you could write your own commands to look up table entries. Everything else is doable with AGK's own built in commands.

Writing your own database driver from within AppGameKit could be a huge job. If you absolutely must read an Access database, I see two options. Find a library that already does it and write a wrapper for it. This would limit you to running on Windows only. The other option is to off-load this to a server and write your own Rest API for communication between your app and the web server that would be doing all the heavy lifting.

I wouldnt over think this...

You can save the access database to .csv then load that into AppGameKit easily
You can save access .mdb to json using online tools or downloadable tools and load that easily into agk (ive done that and it works well)


Looking at the original post...it looks like the information that is stored in the database wouldn't be large or complex anyway. It could just be embedded in the software code itself anyway. Its really very easy logic to determine amounts of developer and peroxide etc and recommend a time for it to be applied straight from manufacturers recommended applications. It wouldn't be hard to do this at all in AppGameKit unless the database stored many different manufacturers developer and colouring options. Even then it wouldnt be difficult to ad an option of which product line to use.


Id be tempted to add functionality to use phone camera to determine customer hair colour and work out the highlight (number of shades lightening/darkening needed automatically) as well as let them pick a colour on the phone.... then it tell you the amounts of product, colour to use and application times....could be quite useful.

I have an app that uses data from Excel. I export the data from Excel to JSON, and import the JSON into arrays.
You can even update the Excel file whilst the App is running, the App checks a folder for new JSON files every few seconds.