Ironwood Omnimedia

I’ve not been very good at updating this particular log with my development of DPnP lately. Its unforgivable, I know, and there are no excuses. However, I will continue with my updates as I can. Sometimes that will be weekly, other times there may be lapses. In some cases long lapses. For the most part there is usually very little to report when I don’t update. Simply saying something like “still working on such and such thing” is flat, useless and a waste of time for myself and readers. I am a single person putting all of this together and that means that it takes a long time, and sometimes longer than I first foresee, to get something finished. So you should expect a report now of some development news. You would be correct.

This week I finished created the offline shopping tools. I took a bit of a break from the Nexus development to finish some key components because they are needed for other things. So, I dug back into the final wizards of the Character Manager and I have some good progress to report.

The shopping tool is a huge tool. It allows the player to purchase and sell items in shops created for the campaign. Game Masters can set rules for the campaign to allow players to use the default campaign shop and/or shops created within the CRM for the campaign. The default campaign shop includes all of the items that can be purchased during initial character creation. However, they have a higher value for purchase, and a lower value for selling that reflects the type of trade being done in a campaign. Game Masters can set this value if they like, just as they do for any shop.

The tools are easy, flexible, and robust. They allow you to switch between shops easily. They automatically remove items sold from unassigned inventory first before removing them from the load outs. Furthermore, the interface is much improved over many of the other interfaces. Controls for buying and selling look better and operate better. In fact I will be applying these new tools to all of the other wizards in the program. This should improve greatly the overall look and feel of the program and make things much easier to use.

Currently there are only two more wizards left to finished. I am working on the computer manager tools. These tools allow you to install and remove software from you character’s computer systems. Programs in a character’s software library can be installed in any system multiple times. Therefore you only have to purchase one copy of the in game software for your characters.

The second, and final wizard is the NPC manager wizard. This allows you to modify any animals, hirelings, and other NPC followers for your character. You can manage their equipment from your character’s on equipment collection, as well as spend experience points to raise or lower their skills. At any point you can also dismiss the character as well. This is the hardest of the two primarily because it needs to be developed in an easy to use way.

Finally I will be adding the new controls I created when I created the shopping control to the other wizards. Its not that much work really. Skills and item selections during character creation will be the easiest and the first to be done. Load outs will be a bit more difficult, but should work easily enough in the end.

The last thing is setting up basic options for the program itself. Changing the dashboard background image, creating the tools to integrate it all into the Nexus website, etc. Ultimately, the smallest and easiest part is the last.

So, that’s the report so far. Still a ways to go yet. However, this current set of wizards I am working on may go pretty smoothly. That may warrant a new update next week.

Happy Gaming!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 27th, 2011 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Campaign Resource Manager, Developer Blog, DPnP, Player Character Creator. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.