Well, the crisis is averted and no one has to rebuild or lose content.
It was a bit of a mess yesterday, and I really was afraid that all my work on building the content was going to have to be redone, or at the least, require some kind of conversion app written in to fix what had seemed to be a pretty big screw up on my part. However, several hours of diligent work, and a very real and literal headache, later I was able to solve the problem and things are back on track.
Sometimes, when I find a seemingly unsolvable problem it helps for me to vent out the fustration and get my feelings vocal. Hence yesterday’s post. It is the reason why I post things like that. For one, it gets me off the task for a moment which helps to break a chain of thought. Sometimes the chain of thought needs to be broken because you find yourself in a loop where you keep missing the solution due to your fustration. By taking a moment to stop, thereby breaking the loop, you find yourself tackling the problem from a new angle later, even if you don’t realise it.
So that is what happened. I stopped the endless loop. Even when I went back to work, shortly after the post and a quick lunch, I thought I was going about it more or less the saame way. I knew the problem lay somewhere in the vicinity of where I had been trying to solve it before. However, growing fustration led to me trying the same thing, or variations of the same thing, over and over again. I needed a clean slate. Venting breaks the momentum and it tends to help me.
So I am sorry for any undue durress I may have caused my testers on that one. Please disregard the madman that raged in that last post, and rest assured everything is fine now and the programs are right along track.
That track being that I am now building the character creator and it is using the content from the CRM. Also, on another positive, I am adding a new feature that is the derived from a conversation and a suggestion from one of my testers, Juan Soto.
Juan made a remark about a visual representation of your character build that would show you how your character stacked up in the game world. This isn’t possible as it requires information on other characters in the world not already built, or speculative input by the GM when building the campaign resources. Instead I have settled on another feature.
In the character generator you will have 3 bars at the bottom of the interface. They are Red (physical combat), Green (general, tech, and other non-combat type skills), and blue (for magic or other specialties such as computers). The bars will alter in length during your build showing the percentage of focus for your character build. For instance, as you build a more combat heavy character the red bar gets bigger, while the other bars shrink. They show a percentage, so you can never have all three, or any one bar, completely full.
It doesn’t show how strong your character is in an aspect in the game world, but it does show your focus on the character. That way, you can easily see if a character is becoming too useless in one aspect or too strong, and ballance accordingly. Furthermore, it happens in real time. As you change an element, such as changing an attribute score, or adding a race, you will see the bars change dynamically. I am also layout out the groundwork for expanding the bars into a details page. In this, you can click on a button near the bars to expand them and gives you a greater breakdown of the buyild. For instance, combat could have subs for agile combat, strength combat, endourance, or alternatively it could represent ranged combat, melee combat, etc.
The bars take into account attributes, racial bonuses, skills, profficiencies, and weapons. At each phase the program determiens what you have built and rebuilds the data for the bar based on your progress.
Anyways, I just wanted to punctuate the fact that things are going smoothly and add that bit of a feature as a bonus to the apology. Hope that helps take the sting out a bit.
Anyways, back to work and Happy Gaming.
