Continue reading »]]> Spent the last few days converting Last Night on Earth to a vassal engine game so that I can play it online.   I’d actually started to write a .Net application to let me play online and that would let me put in some basic AI for the Zombies so that a friend and I could play Co-op against them but being Time Impaired I did some quick googling and came across the Vassal Engine system that lets you convert board games into virtual board games.

Vassal is very much just a presentation layer application.   It does it pretty well but it just doesn’t have any ability to actually program anything in it.  But it took a couple of hours to get the resources into it and working which is significantly less than writing client/server app from scratch.  You get what you pay for and in this case the cost is time.

Last Night on Earth

Continue reading »]]> I’ve always coded little apps and utilities for the purposes of gaming.  I’ve been doing it far back on the TRS-80 Model III that I owned (I spent $500 to put two floppy drives in it back in the day and $150 to boost the memory up to 16k) in junior high, or middle school as they call it these days.

Character generators, combat trackers, map utilities, virtual character sheets, and on into add-ons for various MMOG’s that allowed addons and back to Pen and Paper, I’ve been fortunate enough to have the ability to fill the needs and niches of my gaming habits.

When I started playtesting LCA! I swiftly realized I needed ‘something’ to keep track of things.  The first thing was a simple little app that tracked Energy Points that the characters burned to power their Powers.    Then I got tired of constantly referring to character sheets to figure out what the characters Evasion and Physical Defenses were so I added some drop downs to the app so that they were easily visible.    Then I got tired of tracking initiative using virtual cards.  I was doing the playtesting without benefit of physical objects so that made tracking things a mental excercise and my brain only holds so much at one time before stuff starts slipping and falling to floor.

Then I got tired of being interupted all the time during playtesting and having to re-enter the data so I added the ability to save and load encounters with the current data.

Then I decided to consolidate my dice app into my tracker.  Then I got tired of looking up the characters skills each time they shot something or hit something or made a perception check so I added in a character data form and set it up so that as each character’s turn comes up their skill buttons automatically take into account their skills and if they use a Melee skill the damage buttons automaticlaly add their Strength to the roll etc.

This required the ability to read out of date saves so I had to add versioning to the load and save routines so they knew which data should exist in an encounter file based on the version.

The end result is this -

Continue reading »]]> Wrote a quickly little app that can parse a .monster file and remove 1/2 level to the defenses, add 1/2 level to the damages and adds +2 static attack bonus to the attacks.

With the current iteration of the Monster Builder you have to have a custom version of any official monster in order to export it as XML which is slighly confusing but anyway.  You can edit a monster without any edits so you have a custom version.  Then you can export that as XML using the new feature just added which exports as a dot monster file.

My app parses the monster file (or files if you give it a folder path) and based on the check boxes massages the data.  It then renames the original file to .bak and writes the new file which can be imported back into the monster builder as either a new custom monster or as to update the original custom monster.

I’ve even got a rough level modifier which because most of the items in the creature file are based on level is pretty trivial to implement and unless you’re modifying a lot of creatures at once is kind of pointless since you can just change the level in the MB. Â  A lot of powers are not based on this and as a result modifying a creature’s level will have over or underpowered powers.  These are typically the “Deals +xdx damage when it has combat advantage” or the resistences/vulnerabilities.  But the standard attack and damage based powers level up and down pretty well.

So primarily the way I’ll be using it is I export the monsters I need, run them through the HR’ifier, then import them back into the MB and then print them out for my needs. Â  Should work out fine.

A more involved parser would check every power individually for tier appropriate special damages, force movement amounts and all that.

I think actually I’m going to add in a “convert Stun to Daze” checkbox since being stunned sucks as a player.

D