Ironwood Omnimedia

To say that a lot of new work has gone into DPnP lately is a major understatement. The program has a whole new look and a whole new engine. This came about primarily because of a screw up on my part, but essentially worked out to getting things wrapped up faster, and more full featured. In this update, I talk about why, and show off some new screen shots.

(more…)

I took a break from the Character Manager a few weeks ago. Sometimes it helps to take a step back when you’re running into a patch of difficulty and the NPC manager for hirelings was giving me some trouble. I took the opportunity to dive back into the GM Screen and things went well, until they went horribly wrong.

(more…)

So I am continuing with the work on the wizards. Shopping tools are finished and work perfectly so far as can be told until it gets some more rigorous testing. I have started and finished a large portion of the NPC manager but there are some segments I got a bit stuck with. Ultimately it comes down to design. How much is too much, and how easily can I make management of other characters that are followers of your character, but not as fully developed. Some of it deals largely with character advancement, and the tools I need to build for it. As with all things that give me a bit of difficulty in this way I took a step back and decided to work on some of the other wizards I wanted to add the new controls to.

(more…)

I’ve not been very good at updating this particular log with my development of DPnP lately. Its unforgivable, I know, and there are no excuses. However, I will continue with my updates as I can. Sometimes that will be weekly, other times there may be lapses. In some cases long lapses. For the most part there is usually very little to report when I don’t update. Simply saying something like “still working on such and such thing” is flat, useless and a waste of time for myself and readers. I am a single person putting all of this together and that means that it takes a long time, and sometimes longer than I first foresee, to get something finished. So you should expect a report now of some development news. You would be correct.

(more…)

Here’s the story so far: between real life work, my daughter almost endlessly bringing home some plague or other from school, and other real life issues, I have been making some good progress on DPnP. I have designed and implemented a shopping tool that is very easy to use, but was a completely horrible chore to implement properly. That single feature alone pretty much took a month of work to get rolling along. However, the final product is pretty sweet. That alone might be news but it was just a milestone. That milestone achieved I figured its time to get this bad boy ready for prime time. However, that requires some pretty strong real world testing, and this time I am doing it with some very well planned structure, as well as unrolling the final part of the entire DPnP package – the Sagas RPG Nexus.

(more…)

So the final set of features being added to both the Campaign Manager and the Character Generator are proving to be very difficult. However, this is largely attributed more to the detail being placed into each feature. They are important features, such as spending money between campaigns. So, since it has been a while since my last post, I thought I would recap some of the latest developments I’ve added, and brush across some that I am working on.

(more…)

Yes, its been a long time running. Its also been a long time between posts. A lot has changed in my personal life that is making things run a bit slower. The delays led to some conversations with one of my testers about the progress of DPnP, why things are not finished, and what still needs to be done. Those questions were interesting to me and got me thinking that those answers should be delivered publicly as well. The small Q&A below is paraphrased but you get the idea.

(more…)

As I get further and further along with the code on DPnP their inevitably comes a time when I have to hit a stopping point and go back to clean up the code. I doubt its a best practice sort of thing, but it is a necessary part of the whole learn as you go sort of thing. As development gets further and further along, and the program gets more and more complex, things start to slow down when running it. This is usually because I did something the long way and I may later learn a much easier (speaking in terms of computer resources that is) way to get things done. I make notes of things as I go, and then go trekking back to those areas and clean things up, streamline them, and in generally get things running in a smoother way. It becomes even more necessary as you start expanding on how things are going to work. For instance, character sheets are getting a bit of a tweak.

(more…)

As promised, today I am getting in depth with the Character Journal of the PC manager. Frankly, this feature may not mean anything to many players, but for some like me this is an exciting element of the program that I plan to use like crazy!

(more…)

No sooner than about two days after I had posted that I was removing the ability to have more than one character load out (inventory configuration) than I was able to get things working in an easy way (for the end user). So, with that in the can, so to speak, I moved back towards the aspects of the program dealing with the bread and butter of characters in an RPG, experience points, loot, etc.

(more…)