The PW Char Archiver (pwchar_archive) is a command-line tool for maintaining your character history. It is primarily intended for people who play in the Persistent Worlds (PWs), but should work just fine for other kinds of character archival uses. It's so pure and simple program that any smart person can figure out tons of unpleasant things to use this for.

Basically, it works like this: Every time you're about to log out of a PW, you use the "Save Character" button. A copy of your character is stored in your localvault folder. This program takes the PW character files you tell it to take and puts them into an archive folder, with date and time stamp in the filename. This way, it's easy to find the past versions of these characters of yours.

The version 1.2 is written in Perl. There's nothing wrong with it, except that it needs Perl and it has hard-coded directory separators, meaning it probably won't run on Windows at all, unless you know what you're doing.

Version 2.0 is a Java program. The rewrite was mostly due to the fact that NWN players who have dabbled in the fine art of using Third-Party Tools have probably JRE installed - and I don't want to annoy people by asking them to install Perl as well. (Maybe one day I'll port sshotcollect, too...)

Documentation for 1.2

This program is almost self-documenting in Linux: pwchar_archive --documentation=html > pwchar_archive.html or pwchar_archive --documentation=man > pwchar_archive.1 will produce the documentation in HTML or manpage format. (Requires perldoc / pod2whatever command thingies to be there.) The generated files are also included in the zip.

Documentation for 2.0

Some awfully complex and probably inadequeate documentation can be found in the file README.html in the zip file. Or, just check out the included script files.