TreePad Business Edition

[Lizard]

I have been experimenting with this (you can get a 21 day demo at www.treepad.com), and I must say I'm impressed. I chose the business edition because many of the bells and whistles are useful for gaming -- specifically, the ability to create simple forms in XML for controlled data entry.

I'm finding it a useful tool for both long document management and world notes, and I thought I'd pass the recommendation along for any other gamemasters drowning in snippets of information about their worlds. The greatest weakness, to my mind, is the lack of any integrated game-related functionality or any sort of programming interface. (i.e, being able to write VBscript automation).

Has anyone else tried this, or similair, programs?

 

[DMFTodd]

Has anyone else tried this, or similair, programs?

I haven't tried TreePad but the Tree/Word Processing combo looks similar to the Codex Tree that is in DM's Familiar. And DMF has the game functionality your looking for.

RPM has something similar as well. Don't know if DM Genie does or not.

 

[Lizard]

I haven't tried TreePad but the Tree/Word Processing combo looks similar to the Codex Tree that is in DM's Familiar. And DMF has the game functionality your looking for.

RPM has something similar as well. Don't know if DM Genie does or not.

RPM has a very nice tree-centric system with advanced editing and hyperlinking, but my experiences with trusting RPM to handle my data have been less than ideal. While it has a feature set to die for, even in the latest, 'stable', releases, I experience crashes and data loss. (For example, recently, two major NPC were calculated with a Fort save of "#N/A" and I managed to get a nasty cascade failure by creating a character with no name.) I haven't tried DMF.

What impresses me about TPB is the richness of the feature set; full text formatting, structured forms, good hyperlinking, sorting of trees and subtrees, selection of icons for nodes, export to html, xml, or plaintext of either the entire tree or arbitrary nodes, and so on.

 

[Luke]

While it has a feature set to die for, even in the latest, 'stable', releases, I experience crashes and data loss. (For example, recently, two major NPC were calculated with a Fort save of "#N/A" and I managed to get a nasty cascade failure by creating a character with no name.)

A couple of issues did creep through with the latest release. Sorry about that. Often times, when major features are introduced, finding and fixing an issue it does take a version or 2 to sort out. The latest NPC +equipment generator features are pretty major features.
You should find that "dataloss" is only relevant to something you've just created, since I switched to a "incorruptible" database system many versions ago.

As always, please report any issues to me at luke_jones@roleplayingmaster.com. Often NPC generation issues can be simply traced to one of the datasets made by the RPM yahoo community - and easily dealt with. I can generally get a fix out pretty quickly (and at least explain very quickly how to avoid an issue).

Regards,
Luke

 

[MythosaAkira]

Has anyone else tried this, or similair, programs?

I've found ActionOutline to be quite good. It doesn't have quite as many features as you list for Treepad, but it has enough for what I've needed it for. It's been very dependable, too (I used to use MyInfo up to version 2.0 or 2.1 until it ate my data...)