PCGen 5.9.4 is available

[kingpaul]

PCGen is pleased to announce version 5.9.4 (release notes).

 

[dvvega]

Are there any plans for speeding up the Mac version of PCGen? Or should Mac users write it off?

D

 

[kingpaul]

There's actually only one version of PCGen. For some reason, Macs tend to run java slower. I know the code monkeys are speeding up PCGen in general. I talked with our Content SB (a Mac user), and he pointed me to a thread on CMP's site about Macs and PCGen. I'll copy his response here for simplicity.

Hi Guys
I'm a mac user as well and ran into this same problem when I got my updated sets.
Here is what to do:

First off you will need the standard release package, I don't know if you can do what I will show you with the packaged mac app and also that release doesn't come with the script we'll use.

In the pcgen folder find the file: pcgen.sh (this is a unix shell script, don't ask me what that is, I'm clueless) and open it with a text editor. At the bottom you will find this line:

java -jar ./pcgen.jar "$@"

This is what we will need to change. One thing to keep in mind with this stuff is that many times you will need to specify a directory path to point to things, this is to tell the computer where things are. This is something us Mac users are just not accustomed to (not generally needing a command line interface). This is not hard, the path on my machine is this:

/Applications/PCGen/pcgen.jar

Since you will need to enter a path more than once for this excersize I recomend not burying it to deep within your hard drive. Also the terminal does not like spaces or periods so if you use any in any of the directories in the path you should change the names and take those out.

So, back to that line, change it to this:

java -Xms256m -Xmx256m -jar /Applications/PCGen/pcgen.jar "$@"

except that you should use whatever path is correct for your machine. You can put in higher numbers if you've got the RAM to spare, experiment to see what works. Save that and open the Terminal, we're now going to tell the terminal to run that script, type:

bash /Applications/PCGen/pcgen.sh

again use the path for you machine, if you've done this correctly you should see PCGen start up and you should be able to load more datasets without things grinding to a halt.

Smile Now for a bonus trick:

Go into the terminal app up to the file menu and choose Save. You will see on the lower half of the save dialoge window 2 radio buttons, activate the one which says "Execute this command (specify complete path)" and in the field put in the bash command, in my example:

bash /Applications/PCGen/pcgen.sh

then give it a name and hit save. This will create a .term file and when double clicked this will open the terminal, run the command and start up PCGen saving you the effort of typing (which is what having a Mac is all about right?)

 

[dvvega]

Okay so its a memory allocation issue ... would it be an idea for you guys to prepackage such a term file with the release at all?

Just a suggestion.

D

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

What is the most current stable release? 5.8.0? Whats different between that one and this one? Don't need to get all the little details, jsut wondering if I should upgrade or wait for the next stable release. Also, can PCs created on 5.8.0 be used with 5.9.4 or do I need to recreate them?

 

[kingpaul]

Okay so its a memory allocation issue ... would it be an idea for you guys to prepackage such a term file with the release at all?

I'll pass the suggestion along. I don't use Macs, so I don't know what all would be involved.

 

[kingpaul]

What is the most current stable release? 5.8.0?

5.8.0 is the most stable release. There is work on a 5.8.1 patch, but that's still in the release candidate stage.

Whats different between that one and this one? Don't need to get all the little details, jsut wondering if I should upgrade or wait for the next stable release. Also, can PCs created on 5.8.0 be used with 5.9.4 or do I need to recreate them?

5.9.4 is the 4th alpha since 5.8.0. As for all the difference, I'll need to dig through all the release notes and try to sum them up for you. There have been speed increases, and I know that how default monsters work has changed. To my knowledge, I don't think there have been code changes to break 5.8.0 character in 5.9.4, but I'll ask.

 

[dvvega]

The difference is just to add the -Xms bit to the command line in the pcgen.sh file.

So you would create a pcgenmac.sh file and we can run it from that.

After adding the memory allocation ... it has improved somewhat (I have a gig of memory though so I've given it 512mb each way).

D