Speaking of future development, I've picked up a copy of the latest version of Traveller, Traveller5, and am starting to think about producing apps for this role-playing game. Stay tuned.
All of my Classic Traveller apps here were developed using Real Studio by Real Software. The company has rebranded the product as Xojo and updated it to support Cocoa apps on the Macintosh. So all my future development will be using Cocoa instead of the older Carbon and will change the minimum version of Mac OS X that my apps will run on. If I update any of the old Classic Traveller apps to Cocoa in the future, I will continue to make the older versions available as well.
Speaking of future development, I've picked up a copy of the latest version of Traveller, Traveller5, and am starting to think about producing apps for this role-playing game. Stay tuned.
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I've tested my apps and believe them to be 100% compatible with Apple's new version of Mac OS X. Of course, these apps don't support some of the new features of Lion (versioning, etc.), but those features aren't really pertinent. Lion does slightly change the look of the apps, squarer pushbuttons for instance, but this just makes them look purtier and doesn't affect performance.
Now that all of my character generation apps can save completed character descriptions to a file, I need to decide what to do with those files.
I've started preliminary work on a character editor, which will open multiple character files and allow editing. This will require me to learn some new programming techniques, so progress may not be fast. Eventually, this work will be useful in creating future apps such as the ones I've mentioned in previous blog posts here. After much discussion with others over on the Citizens of the Imperium forum, I've finalized the standard format I will be using to save character data. It's a human-readable XML file that you can open with TextEdit and browse or even edit (cheater!).
Each of the character generation programs will create files with a different file extension (.nct1, .nct2, etc.) so that if you double-click on a file in the Finder it will load into the program that created it. Any programs that I write in the future that can import completed characters will be able to open any of these files via an Open File dialog in the program. I've already added this functionality to Mercenary and High Guard and will be releasing them shortly. Try it out! Save a completed character, quit the program, and either double-click the file or relaunch the program and use the File>Open… menu item. The saved character will be loaded and you can print the TAS Form 2. There's one annoying cosmetic bug that I can't fix right now. Instead of displaying the cool file icon in the Finder, you get a QuickLook image of the contents of the file. I hope to be able to address this with a future release of Real Studio. Next up in my development schedule I'm going back to all of my current applications and will be adding the ability to save a completed character's description to a file.
This will allow characters to be imported into new applications not yet developed that I've been thinking about. Examples: • A utility program for handling all the bookkeeping involved in playing Snapshot. DM calculations, Action Point, wound, and ammunition tracking, etc. • A similar utility program for Azhanti High Lightning. • A referee's aid for Classic Traveller that would allow editing of the character's status, cash, and possessions, as well as perform a whole bunch of useful functions related to adventures. In a previous News category post I gave a list of possible character generation programs to work on next. After thinking about these and looking them over, I've decided that the basic characters found in Supplement 4: Citizens of the Imperium would be of most interest to referees and players.
I'd really like to do Scientists - Technicians, academics, and researchers, from an article in Freelance Traveller 4, but I can't locate the author and ask for permission. Similarly, I'm not sure I can get permission to do Terrorists - from an article in Space Gamer 46. I will probably come back and do some of the others later, but I think they're of limited interest. There's always a need for quick-and-dirty NPCs to assist and confound player characters, and Citizens fills the bill. I considered adding the character classes from Book 1: Characters and Combat, but since it's so easy to create characters with the applications I've already done, and they cover the same character classes as in Book 1, I've decided not to do that. But I am going to add in the bonus class Assassins - From Paranoia Press' Scouts & Assassins. While working on Merchant Prince, I noticed that the "Handgun" skill is defined differently than in High Guard. This "composite" skill gives skills in different weapons in these character generation systems.
So I've decided instead of awarding a vague "composite" skill like Handgun, or Laser Weapons, or Zero-G Weapons, that I should just award skills separately for each weapon as defined in each character generation system. The advantage to this is that if I ever code an application that imports characters created in different systems, there won't be any confusion about their gun skills. Scouts doesn't have this problem, as the "Gun Combat" cascade skill there requires the selection of one specific weapon. Look for version 1.0 of Merchant Prince within a week or so, followed by new versions of High Guard, Mercenary, and Scouts with this enhancement and other bug fixes. There are a variety of Classic Traveller advanced character generation systems that were proposed in magazine articles and in supplements by other companies besides GDW. Here they are in no particular order:
If you have any suggestions or preferences, please leave a comment and let me know. After High Guard is released, development will continue on the following products.
Naasirka, a Vilani Megacorporation, is pleased to announce its new website for distribution of fine Macintosh software products to the citizens of the Imperium.
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