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.

I took advantage of some of my sick time to read up on XML structure, as well as the benefits of using it. The reason why it interested me in the first place was portability. With XML, a user can take information from one program, and represent that data in a format that is both human readable, and programmaticly readable. That means that those of you out there that may be familiar with other languages, such as Java, or even Mac programmers, can develop tools to read the data from the DPnP formats. 

Originally I had thought this might be nice for those that wanted to develop websites or other media types to review the information. It is also a method of representing hat data in a format that can be customized aesthetically. I still have some issues with it. For instance, security is an issue. If the data is available in XML what is to stop you from getting, and copying, paid for content and distributing it freely?  I have not been able to answer that question to my satisfaction, aside from trusting my customers enough to hope that one would pay the modest price for the official content rather than stealing stuff from other users. 

Luckily, I trust in the good nature of people.

Unfortunately, due to some things that we want to release ourselves, the license for creating content that uses XML data will be limited to viewers. You will be bound to not actually be able to manipulate the data (i.e. change the data or create new data). You can, for instance, create a Character Sheet Viewer, but you cannot create a Character Generator. The reason is simple, we want you to have the best possible program. When  we create a program we are constantly looking at ways to make it work in very clever ways. For instance, we are adding XML, which has little benefit to us, but opens up some options for the user. The reason is, I thought to myself “as a user, what would I like to do with the data that I can’t do presently”. The answer was to have the data in a format that would allow interoperability between formats. 

When I created the CRM I thought “How cool would it be to share just portions of content. That way I could download a user’s creature pack to add to my campaign.” I looked, found, and designed a method to do that with as much ease as possible. 

To lay it out, we are not just trying to create the programs, we are trying to improve on similar ideas by adding in wish list types of items. There is so much being added that expands the programs, but actually cost us to add them. A simple program could have been released six months ago. However, it was basic, and offered nothing different than that of other programs I have seen that are similar. The only good would have been a short term group of sales, but not any kind of real value to those sales. Having a bunch of emails wanting both bug fixes, and features, would have not helped our customers feel supported, or present a focus on innovation on our part. I don’t want to create just another software suite for RPGs. I want to build the one that I wish I had whenever I look at all the others.

So, XML will likely be in the release of both the CRM and the CC. Its a bit more work, but I honestly feel that if it benefits a few users at the end of the day, then it will be worth the wait in the long run. In all honestly, it shouldn’t push things back any longer than my migraines have.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 8:18 am and is filed under Campaign Resource Manager, Developer Blog, DPnP, Player Character Creator. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.