Righty hoh, my brain is now functioning again after an encounter with Morrus and a pack of angry although surprisingly refreshing CR10 Beer Demons and their leader CR20 Double Whisky (with Water Elemental familiar). Needless to say we were victorious and many of the enemy fell before us.
I have over time and similar encounters learned that the more beer demons you defeat the greater the wrath of the Demon Lord Hangover although.....this time I was suprised when his new side-kick Demon Prince 10AM Hotel Firealarm Test made an appearance. I shall be prepared next time (*inspects Mufflers of Fire Resistance 20*)
Anyhow....back to reality..... I'll try and answer a few points that have been raised.
azhrei_fje said:
Actually, this turns me off. But it's more a principle thing than anything else. While the Mono project is progressing, it will be some time before the Window.* and Forms.* modules are complete enough to actually use. And given their track record, I expect MS to create a "dialect" of .NET that isn't part of the ECMA standard; oh, and guess which version of .NET their tools will target?
Yup, on past 'strategy' from the BoR I'd come to this conclusion too. My main reason for selecting this technology for RPGXplorer was that, frankly, I come from an MS programming background and switching would have required significant time spent on learning a new set of skills (not smart when ur setting up a new company). The decision was made easier by the fact that .Net is theoretically a cross-platform techology and while I wanted to focus on the Windows version first, I also wanted to be able to produce Unix and Mac versions. The criticism eTools received for not doing this was not far from my mind either. I'm hopeful we can still achieve this although like you say Mono is lagging behind a bit. Once we have 1.1 out of the door we'll start looking at it.
azhrei_fje said:
Concerning performance being better in .NET than Java: I'll believe it when I see it. They both have virtually identical technology: a virtual machine that runs pseudo-compiled code, and an interface for running truly compiled code ("unmanaged" in .NET, "native" in Java).
I wasn't aware .Net was faster. I'd be equally skeptical of any such claim. I don't see how it could be faster. The architecture of running the intermediate language couldn't possibly be significantly different. There's only a very small amount of scope for varying the way you'd implement it IMHO.
azhrei_fje said:
Having said all that, when the tool has evolved a bit, I'll take a look at it. I prefer open source tools -- I don't want to be stuck with a dead-end application because Billy Bob and his brother Darryl decided they didn't want to work on it any more. Which is why I'm writing my own mapping software with fog-of-war support and releasing it under the GPL. If I get hit by a truck or something, all of the users are not scr*wed (er, I mean, "left out in the cold").
- first off, we're British but I take your point. Pierce Morgan Ltd. is a small company for sure, but we are a company. We have offices in the Aberdeen Science and Tech Park, full-time staff and short of a nuclear attack, I think we'll be around for a while. As for open-source we've made a committment to make RPGXplorer freeware in the event of the company folding. That's very unlikely though.
We're also committed to responding to feature requests as you will find out if you check out our Feature Requests and Features Released forums, although at the moment we're obviously limited by the fact that our priority is to get v1.0 out asap.
JoeGKushner said:
So when is the fully functional version supposed to be out and how much is it going to cost and what type of data expansion packs are being looked at?
October. It's $30. We're hoping that we'll have every kind of expansion available from PrC's to Magic Weapons and everything in between.
Raevynn said:
I like the idea.. I have played around with the demo.. Might be inclined to buy... but it is very IE/Windows specific.... On my windows boxes I use firefox, and my portable is a Powerbook with OSX 10.4.x...
The IE dependency is temporary until we can replace it with a .Net browser component like Syncfusions'. This is essential before we can do a Unix/Mac build also. No reason why you can't use Firefox as your main browser, we just use a plug-in component within the application. For schedule on this see above. More info on our forums too.
smootrk said:
One aspect that I did not like was having to effectively work with the data, and then separately have to work with a html editor to make a rule page that fully described the particular rule component. Not terribly difficult to work around; I just don't like switching back and forth, and typing some info twice. A better user interface that supports both aspects of data entry would be a plus for me.
We took a decision early on that HTML was the only effective way to present rule 'pages' to the user and I think it is the right decision. We looked briefly at using XSLT to allow a single point of data entry and to generate the HTML for you but this is just not practical for reasons I'm sure you can work our yourself. I've given a lot of thought to this problem and the only feasible solution IMHO is to improve our HTML templates over time and to perhaps integrate an HTML Editor and tools directly into the application (there is also some scope for using XSLT to set heading etc. which we need to get done). There's a forum on our site that's looking at ways of easing the HTML input process, speak to a guy called Nebular, he's created a tool called RPGXHelp and used it to put in rule pages for over 800 feats since the beta came out. There's a link in our Tools forum.
I should reiterate at this point that we do not tolerate the sharing of non-OGL data on our site and discourage it among our users. I only mention it to prevent people reading this from asking Nebular for his data. Don't. He won't.
I
smootrk said:
also think the company may gather more support and possibly even help with finding those little quirks faster if they created a few tutorials or walkthru's for entering some different types of data (Feats, Classes, Items, etc.). With more people doing little tests with data and finding those little areas that need tweaking they could fix the majority of those issues faster, but I know folks don't like to "figure it out by themselves."
We put an apology into the beta for the lack of help/tutorials. This will not be the case in the main version.
smootrk said:
Also, they will quickly need to add the ability to have multiple rule sets. Some folks operate multiple campaigns using very different types of rules, like one homebrew, and another as a FR campaign. They need the ability to be able to code their rule sets separately without having them co-mingled.
We have a couple of open Feature Requests on this. I think they've been scheduled for 1.1 (*checks*). Yup the main one is 1.1. We'll be putting a sourcebook/license property on each component for 1.0. No exact date for 1.1 at the moment.
smootrk said:
All in all, for a pre-release beta, despite my minor criticisms, I am impressed and I think that the product will have wide support once it gets out to the masses.
BTW, I have tried several other types of products. Those products are good as well, but as RPGXPlorer continues its refinements and development, I believe it will be the best option for me.
Thanks, I'm sure it will be
