Documents-to-Go is a piece of crap

Transferring files to a new PC should not be this big of a pain-in-the-ass. More on this later (including my tribulations with Gateway tech support).

I should not have to tell "Documents-to-Go" the location of every goddamn file I have to re-sync with the Palm. I should be able to do it en masse.

Is there a way to do it? Probably, but it's not intuitive. And people still wonder why the average person is computer illiterate. I'm far from that myself, but I don't relish taking time out of my day to restore everything back the way it was. I have better things to do with my time.

Can a plug for your own stuff on your own site be shameless?

Ryan Dancey (excerpted from here):

"I think that D&D has to strike a happy medium. If it gets too complex, the rules get in the way of playing the game. I have felt for a long time that the more integrated computer assistance becomes, the more complex the rules can become without disturbing this happy medium. Weather effects, for example, are a hard thing to incorporate into D&D without making the "cost" of the rules far outweigh the benefits. However, if the actual rules themselves could be moderated by computer assistance, then the roleplaying and dramatic value of weather would be a great addition to the game."

What does this mean? Buy a Palm, download my programs, and register TableSmith eXpress!

Hehe...

Why Namemaker?

Some people may be wondering why I put "Namemaker" together when I already had TSX. The primary reason was speed. I had an idea, and being the geek I am I had to test it out. I created a new storage format for the TSX tables to see if it would improve performance - and it did amazingly so. Which, I think, makes "Namemaker" far more useful for most people than TSX.

Simply put, with something like TSX (or the desktop TableSmith), most people don't care if they have the ability to create their own tables. They want a tool that has done the work for them already. Essentially, you get both with desktop TableSmith - it has a ton of tables available for people who just want to use them, but you also can create and edit your own. You also get both with TSX, but at the cost of speed. To provide the flexibility that TableSmith enjoys, TSX has to do some things that don't make it the speediest Palm program out there. It runs acceptably on my PDA (Zire 71, 144 Mhz...and it looks like it's been discontinued by Palm...the 72 runs at 312 Mhz? Wow...hmm...no, can't justify that yet...but, I digress), but I imagine that on older, slower Palms, it's slow enough to be unacceptable. So for people who don't want the ability to create their own tables, they can't even run the ones that exist.

Thus, the reason for Namemaker.

Saturday Gaming Goodness

Finished another Palm util last night - the "Character Manager". Well, sort of. I'll be expanding it more over time, but for now I needed a nexus-point of sorts to get characters into the Palm for use with the other apps (like the XP Tracker). I'll probably be posting it tomorrow some time; I'm hoping to get the mods to XP Tracker done in the next hour and a half, before my regular Saturday game begins. The modifications would allow XP Tracker to apply XP directly to a character record rather than just telling you what the division of XP will be.

Finally finished cutting the pieces from the sprues for Attack!, the A&A-like sort-of-WW2 game from Eagle Games. Not sure when we're going to play, but I'm looking forward to it - looks like a fun game. Of course, I still have to cut the naval units from the sprues for the expansion...

Picked up Complete Divine this afternoon. I'll be looking at the prestige classes first so I can finish the page that describes how they fit into Mythosa (for those that do fit). I've only glanced over CD so far, but it does look pretty good, and maybe better then Complete Warrior.

Za?

I don't know why, but I find this to be hysterical.

Oh, "XP Tracker" should be available soon. Need to update the Dungeon index too, since I finally got issue #111 in the mail.

Editted: I remove the link since the target picture keeps changing; doesn't make sense to keep it any longer. The original was a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head, with the caption: "I have no idea what you're talking about, so here's a bunny with a pancake on its head."

Another Palm Utility and Other Stuff

I'm in the process of tweaking "XP Tracker", another (my third!) PalmOS RPG utility. This one allows you to keep track of things your PCs do for experience. Primarily the slaughter of misunderstood forces of darkness, I'm sure, but other stuff, too. Whatever has a CR...

I should be posting the app in the next day or two. The next one is a character manager, though it'll initially be fairly small. It's primarily a focal point for a lot of other apps I'm planning (treasure tracker, spell tracker, etc.).

I've got a write-up on Prestige Classes and where they fit into Mythosa ready for being put into XHTML and uploaded, but I decided to hold off on posting it. With Complete Divine coming out this week (it's probably already out; I need to swing by the game shop this weekend), I figured I'd wait to see what I would include from that.

It's raining again, which likely means more water in the basement. Sigh...gotta get that taken care of.

Site Update

Almanac is in the RPG Utilities area of the main site. It's Mythosa-specific (see earlier postings as to why this is), but we'll see what the future holds. I have started mentally planning my next PalmOS utilities, and thus far what I have in mind will be both generic and probably free. Of course, by "generic" I mean non-world specific. Since I play D&D 3.5, they'll be designed for that. Well, technically, for d20. But without the d20 logo. I can still use the OGL for d20-based software, but using the logo with software is too much of a grey area in some cases, outright prohibited in others. I don't want to with that, so they'll be OGL. The source will be available as well, of course, so you can see what's open and what's not. Of course, you'll need to use CASL if you want to modify the code...

I also added a Trivia page, to capture the little items that I want to get posted somewhere. The Detailed Climate Zone map is something I created for myself as a reference for the Almanac program. The weather system was originally based on latitude, but the results didn't quite match what I wanted for particular areas of my world. So, like any good Hollywood writer or junk scientist, I changed the data to fit my desired outcome. Hey, it's a fantasy world, and it works. It's one of those things that fits my philosophy of "it doesn't matter if it's realistic, just if it's realistic enough".

Threw a couple of things into the Timeline that came up when I was putting in the Trivia page. I also modified my "House Rules" based on some recent observations in my campaign. The main one is dumping "Armor as Damage Reduction" (ADR) from Unearthed Arcana. I like the idea, and my initial analysis of it indicated that it was workable, but I've since found some holes in it that I didn't see initially. Suffice to say, the idea being this variant is that you get hit more often but take less damage. Unfortunately, I've found situations where you end up getting hit more often and taking more damage. If I find some time I'll post the scenario I came up with that shows this. Rather than change the rules even further to accommodate ADR, I've decided to go back to the standard way of doing armor class.

Friday Ramblings

My wife and I went to see Van Helsing earlier this evening. We found it entertaining, though we weren't expecting much. It's not really a serious movie, it's more of a "fun" movie. Even so, there were still a few things that bugged me (and yes, that's despite accepting the concept of vampires, werewolves, a James Bond-style Vatican monster hunter, etc.).

I also recently finished watching the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Season One DVDs. Most of what they covered was stuff I already knew, but I did learn a few new things and they were entertaining in any case. If you like P&T, or are a skeptic about things (ranging anywhere from alien abductions to consequences of second-hand smoke), I'd recommend it.

Finally, I had the day off today, and after I got up (12:30 pm or so - I'm not a morning person) I finished the "Almanac" PDA app I've been working on. I'll be uploading it to the site soon. It's pretty much tied to Mythosa, but it might be worth looking at and getting some ideas from. As I mentioned, if there's enough requests, I may make it customizable, or provide a service to create customized versions for people. We'll have to see.

More on Palm RPG utilities...

Correction - I now have three registrations for TSX! Much appreciated to those who've registered. I should probably market it a bit more...

In other Palm RPG news, I've been playing around with Cartoforge, an adventure/mapper tool. The mapper is kind of neat, and the adventure creation part has some cool ideas, but it's a little too generic for my use. I'd consider buying it just for the mapper, but $25 seems a bit steep for that. But you may want to check it out.

"Almanac" is looking good (for a simple Palm app). Hopefully I'll have it done within a week.

My latest gaming tool for PalmOS - "Almanac" - is coming along nicely. It's a calendar/weather generator, similar to some of the other programs I've written for Windows in the past. Currently, it's specific to Mythosa. If there's enough interest, I may make it customizable. I'm not real enthusiastic about that, though, given that I've had a grand total of two registrations of TableSmith eXpress. Granted, TSX is rather slow for older Palms, the RPG utility market is pretty small, and calendar/weather programs are a pretty niche product. Given all the other things on my "want to-do" list, customizing Almanac isn't high on my list.