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I know I have been a poor blogger. I have not kept up these past weeks as I should. There are some good reasons for it, but the main reason is not important at all. You see, I found twitter not long ago, and I have been updating very frequently through there. This leaves me with very little to actually blog about. Not much of an excuse, but there it is. Anyways, onto thing you really want to know.

Coming up, just after the 4th, Zach from RPGBlog2 will be getting an exclusive first look at Digital Pen n Paper. He is only getting it a very short time before release. Following his release of the first look and his opinions on it I will be sending out press releases marking the actual release date. Zach may even have that information as well.

A release date is nice and such, but ultimately it is only a date. As usual, I have more information on features that will be added, hopefully into the final release.

The Campaign Resource Manager (CRM) is getting the largest feature add ons. I am feverishly working on those right now. Two of these I will not mention. They are for Zach’s first look. Instead, I want to let you in on some better news.

Earlier I had mentions that the CRM will not include things for building a campaign world. I have since changed my opinion of that. Today I am hoping to wrap up three new additions to the the CRM. They are outlined as follows:

• Factions: NPCs have a dominate faction. They may be commoner, noble, bandits, monsters, or things more detailed such as Border-town Commoner, or Royal Family of Blah. Factions, in turn, have relationships between each other. This is a loose generalization of how a certain faction generally appeals to another. In this new wizard you create and describe a faction, then determine how that faction feels towards another, and vice versa.
• NPCs: This actually uses the similar wizards to the Character Manager. However, it is simplified, allowing you to simply make an NPC or creature, choose a faction for that creature, and your done.
• Regions: Regions are areas or territories. They break down from a root area, such as the world name, or continent, or galaxy, or whatever you choose. You then break them down into small groups. For instance, you would have Planet Earth -> North America -> United States -> Florida -> Orlando -> Downtown. Each are regions that share similar basic information. When you create a region you select dominate factions, and can also create a list of notable NPCs, as well as other notables such as shops. You can also set up racial density and more. It sounds much more complicated here than it actually is in the wizard.

As for progress on the Character Management System (CMS), I have some development news. For one, I have finished a prototype of an XSL character sheet. XSL are basically like style sheets that render the data from a character into a usable character sheet. The release version of the character creator will have one character sheet broken into several types. One is simple, which mimics the character sheets you get in the players guidebooks. Another is Extended, which includes all the stuff from your simple sheets but will also print your skills, equipment, magic, etc. as you see them in the player’s guidebook with your character’s stats attached. The third is NPC Encounter which is a very simple sheet that looks like the NPC stat blocks that appear in our published adventures. Furthermore, these will also be available in rich text format as well.

This also means that customized XSL character sheets are definately in. Anyone familiar with XSL will be able to create their own character style sheets, and we may even have some in the works as well for various adventures or campaign settings.

The character sheet display also has two views now attached. If you compile the character sheet you can look at this in a web browser in the actual character generator, or you can revert to the rich text format you have seen in the screenshots. All in all it adds different ways of viewing the same information. However, one is much simpler to render so that if something isn’t appearing properly you can simply revert to the other.

I still have some work to do to reduce the size of the XML data. Furthermore, the CRM will not have an XML output upon release, but will be patched in later. The XML data for the CRM isn’t all that huge of a deal since the rich text format renders nicely and is easily copied and used in a word processing document with formatting included. XML data will appear nice in a web page, but ultimately doesn’t work as well for using in a Microsoft Word type of manipulation. 

So I hope the above has settled the debt owed for failing to keep up with the blog. Anyways, I have much to do today. Until next time…

Happy Gaming!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 7:58 am and is filed under Campaign Resource Manager, DPnP, Developer Blog, E-RPG General Development, Overall Development, 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.