Ironwood Omnimedia

I know, I have been quiet. I have been sick with migraines and back problems (one compounds the other which compounds the former). Anyways, I am back, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot of catching up this week. It is a busy week for myself and my daughters. So, with having almost two weeks of very little progress, it is time to catch up, right? Well, with limited time, I think I can take what little time I have and apply some little bells and whistles. I am also looking at reintroducing some features. They key feature, XML files, will allow for third party application development that I think may a good topic for discussion. Primarily because it has been on my mind for some time.

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This week was fun, pragmatically speaking. I got to finally finish off the bugs and call skill selection in the character generator complete. Plus, I got some initial rich text code done for the character sheets. Furthermore, I got to add in a new feature.

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…but that is what happened. There was a serious hiccup in skill selection when it came to selecting racial skill affinities for your character. It seems simple enough: you have skill affinities for a race, therefore you automatically get that skill at that level. Everything worked fine except for my dwarf. My dwarf has a skill called Craft (Type). The character maker allows you to use these skills by filling in the text for (Type), replacing it. This function was the cause of a seemingly infinite amount of problems. I will spare you the details of the fix (which finally occurred today) and ramble about some new things that have been happening. Some are about development, one is not.

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I don’t really have a topic. So I am just going to ramble on a bit about the development, and the fun going on with it. (more…)

I spent the better part of this week writing out a very complicated bit of controls for the character creators skill selection section of the program. The code was complicated so that the user interface would be very easy. However, there have been some problems. There is a noticeable lag in button press responses. Even after streaming down the code, refreshing menus is taking too long. The problem is that graphically there is too much going on. I went about this the same way as the CRM but there is a more aesthetic appeal in this program. Therefore, it is creating a problem.

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I can’t say this week was very productive. In fact, by design and purpose it was not (though some things did get done). Instead, this week was an exercise in frustration. I quite smoking, so for almost a full week now I have been trying to survive through the week without my crutch. I have succeeded at something I thought would be a monumental task with very little true effort.  My wife spilled coffee all over my keyboard, thus killing it. I have to settle for a cheap $20 crapper with very poor ergonomic support until some sales bump the good $70 ones down in price. My wife and I shared a cold this week as well. Only one real positive, my wife’s birthday, was fun at all. However, it carried its own stress. All of this made for a poor week to not be smoking. But, then again, there would not have been a good week for it either. So now that its over, it is time to sum it up as a good week for accomplishment personally. I must say, success is a good feeling. With that, lets push on to the next week with some plans.

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Undoubtably, the Character Creator will be the most commonly used aspect of the DPnP suite of tools. As such, it is the most anticipated program and the one I hear the most requests for. However, the CRM, being the lynch pin of the entire system, had to reach a certain milestone in development that will allow me to actually build the Character Creator. I am happy to say that I have reached that stage in the CRM development and that the Character Creator is under development.

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It is Sunday, and that usually means a blog post, then some early morning gaming with my father (we play Battlefield 2 at least once a week online) and then work. However, today, a fierce rainstorm looms on the horizon and being that I lost one motherboard to these wonderful Florida storms, I am playing it safe and shutting things down soon. However, I have just enough time, I think, to post about this week.

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Lately my blog has been filled with discussion on the development of the CRM. The CRM itself is the backbone of the DPnP suite. However, the CRM, from a user perspective, is a small component of what will develop into a large suite of tools for various purposes. Although the CRM is the backbone, what will probably get the most use is the Player Character Creator (PCC). The PCC is being developed, and its development has been in tandem with the CRM, however, to a much lesser degree of focus. Working on both at the same time to varying degrees may seem like I am spreading my energy to thinly. The truth is, it is necessary for both products to be developed together so that features that I believe will really set the PCC apart from other programs are smoothly integrated into the content creation of the CRM. In this article, I am discussing some of those features, and how the two programs work together for both players and game masters.

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