Birthright Campaign Manager tool

[Vicente]

(crossposted from BR.net)

Hi Birthright fans!

I have released an Open Source tool to manage games of AD&D 2e Birthright, you can find it on this website:

Birthright Campaign Manager

Birthright accounting can get crazy pretty fast if you have a few players and you want to manage also the surrounding NPCs. Managing a dozen of domains can be a headache or take a lot of time without using any type of computer support (a tool, Excel,...).

The tool can be used as a Windows application, more suited to manage a Birthright game played between a group of friends around a table. The website contains the 1.0 download for this scenario, just download and install and ready to go.

The tool can be also deployed as a web tool for PbeM games or groups that play over internet. For that you can get the latest source code (although you need a little technical knowledge for this).

There is also some documentation on how to use the tool, specially interesting for GMs:

Birthright Campaign Manager

I have had quite a lot of fun writing this tool, so I hope it can be useful for the community. If you have any questions, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer.

Regards!

Vicente

 

[Mortuis]

Hey, I'm excited to try this out. I've been looking at adapting the birthright system to conduct my Planescape game once I get past Faction War, so I'm hoping this will help me do that.

That said, just as a heads up to my fellow linux users, this program doesn't appear to play nice with wine on Ubuntu 11.10, so you'll either have to break out a VM or use a windows box.

$ wine Birthright\ Campaign\ Manager\ Setup.exe
fixme:storage:create_storagefile Storage share mode not implemented.
fixme:shell:SHGetKnownFolderPath flags 0x00004400 not supported
fixme:shell:SHGetKnownFolderPath flags 0x00004400 not supported
fixme:shell:SHGetKnownFolderPath flags 0x00004400 not supported
fixme:storage:create_storagefile Storage share mode not implemented.


Looking forward to trying it out next time I boot into windows.

 

[Mortuis]

Hmm, not sure what I'm doing wrong. I install on windows, launch the program and am challenged for a username and password. I was never asked to set one up, so I just enter some generic information thinking it will prompt me to create an account, instead it just rejects my signin.

So, I have the program installed but can't sign in to use it?

 

[Vicente]

Hmm, not sure what I'm doing wrong. I install on windows, launch the program and am challenged for a username and password. I was never asked to set one up, so I just enter some generic information thinking it will prompt me to create an account, instead it just rejects my signin.

So, I have the program installed but can't sign in to use it?

Damm, sorry for the late answer, I was subscribed to the thread but somehow I never got a notification about your post.

The tool needs a user and password because it can be used by a Game Master and by the Players, and they must see different information. Initially the tool comes with a default Administrator that will allow you to perform the initial configuration.

All of this is explained in the tool documenation in the website, in this link:

Birthright Campaign Manager

The login you need is:

User: Administrator
Pass: changeme/123

I recommend reading that section and the "Working with data" section that will explain you how to add or import data into the tool.

About Linux, this tool is build around .NET/Silverlight/SQL Server, I doubt it will be run under Mono sadly. I'm trying to improve things on that front, but it's not a priority right now.

 

[Vicente]

On other news, I have finished managed to finish the basic documentation!

The GM Guide can be found at:

Birthright Campaign Manager

And the Player Guide can be found at:

Birthright Campaign Manager

Now I'll start working on version 2 which will add traits, automatic turns, economy, data validation,... I also have to fix a few things I have found while writing the guide and add a few extra things here and there (like more complex ley lines).

Any feedback on the tool it is very appreciated

 

[Mortuis]

Okay, with that guidance I have gotten in and started playing with it. So far it seems really nice, though I'm still entering data.

One question, I'm thinking I'd rather run this in a windows virtual machine in linux and I've already done quite a bit of data entry. How do I back up the game, and restore it on another machine? I see the buttons to import data, but I don't see any information on how to export data.

 

[Vicente]

Glad it helped! And thanks for the nice words

The tool installs a lot of data and empty templates in your "My Documents" folder. For data entry I would recommend the following:

- Write the data in Excel files using the empty templates as a guide.
- Save those Excel files as .CSV files.
- Import the data from the .CSV files.

Writing the data in Excel is way faster than writing data in the tool itself. And if you have your data in Excel you can import that data into several computers easily.

I am not at home so I can not try this right now, but I think the following process works fine to move data from one machine to the other:

- Install the tool into your Virtual Machine.
- Find the database files in your normal machine, they should be in something like:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10_50.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\DATA

The files are called "Birthright Campaign Manager.mdf" and "Birthright Campaign Manager_log.ldf"

- Copy those files into your Virtual Machine overwriting the ones that exist already.

Then you should have the data moved from one machine to the other. I know this process is not very good, but honestly I have not thought about the possibility of moving data between machines (easily).

If that doesn't work let me know. Regards!

 

[Mortuis]

This doesn't seem to work. When I move the "Birthright Campaign Manager.mdf" and "Birthright Campaign Manager_log.ldf" files from the one machine to the other, and then start the program, I get the message "An error occurred while communicating with the database." when i try to sign in. I have to reinstall the program to even be able to sign in with the Administrator userid.

The inability to make a backup of the game would be a concern to me. Even if one were to save those files, based on this experience they couldn't restore the game if there were any problems that required an OS reformat. Perhaps under the Administrator role you could add a database export feature that would dump out a bunch of CSV files like your templates, so that those could be backed up and used to restore the game later? I would imagine that the code wouldn't be hard to write since you have the import functions written already, those same routenes could probably be used after some changes.

 

[Vicente]

Well, you can restore the game from those files, it's just that is not as simple as copying them I was hoping that as the database files are named the same and the login user is named the same, copying would work, but it seems SQL Server needs something more.

The correct solution would be to make a script to attach those files to SQL Server, re-make the login, and solved.

If I gave you a .bat file that would perform this process automatically for you or with maybe some minor edits, as for example the file would say "c:\Program Files" but if your windows is in Spanish you need to change it to "c:\Archivos de programa", would that be an acceptable solution?

Exporting has the problem that there is a lot of data that is not imported right now (for example, armies, turns,...). I think it's better working with the DB files directly, but I would have to give it a good thought on how to do it easily.

 

[Mortuis]

I'd love to try the bat file. At the moment I'm manually transferring the information I entered from the first computer into spreadsheets. The bat file would certainly be faster.