New Anathema Character Management - Anathema Reincarnated

[SpruceStripedGoose]

Youre misunderstanding us. Urs currently has no plans to release EX3 Anathema; he intends to do so at some point in that far off country known as "sometime". But his current interest is in Shadowrun, and he doesnt have enough people to hack it together solo using his coding style. If our project is good enough he may hand off the torch entirely; his blessing is contingent upon the quality of our product so we intend to deliver something truly excellent.

I hope you dont feel as if you NEED anyone's blessing, because at the end of the day you are the only group who are even close to releasing a EX3 manager as far as I know. That makes you the Gods in my eyes, nobody else gets to be the "gatekeeper" if you are the only ones actually treading this ground.

[bjblack]

Well. I'm in serious need of an Exalted manager, so much so that I've forked Urs' code on Github, to see if I can make something usable of it. In doing my due research, I see you're going to release your manager soon, which is good. It sounds like your code will be available as well; also good. I'll likely fork your repository once you release.

I must observe your project is most ambitious; not merely a character manager, but also covering most of what I've laid out as the features without which I won't be satisfied. I have noted here: characters, merits, and Charms, you've specifically said the user can enter, and Negai referred to working on Sorcery and Martial Arts, presumably with similar functionality to the user; and you'll have a character creation wizard. I would add races, Exaltation types, character generation templates, Thaumaturgic rituals, and items (especially weapons and armor)... but with the impression you give, I'd guess you already have those.

That alone would make an excellent tool for the Exalted community. The chronicle editor is also something I've thought about- or at least, I've thought of something that could be described with that term. Arian described the Chronicle Editor as where the user enters homebrew Charms and merits, and my idea is something else entirely. Call it what you will, here is what I have in mind: a log of game events and their effects on the characters. For instance, if someone's mortal Retainer is badly injured (all the way to -4, all lethal) on RY 768, Ascending Earth 7, the calendar would show that, if he rested, he would recover on Descending Earth 3- without your need to consult the book like I just did. This would also keep track of experience: when and how you earned it, and on what you spent it- very important if you have someone heavily into the Craft system. Perhaps it would go so far as to track Willpower- Essence pools would be a little too far, I think, but it might be useful under certain circumstances.

Part of that is my desire not to follow the characters later: starting by looking at their stats at character generation, then watching how the story affected them- and how they adapted to affect the story.

Finally there's your combat tracker. You've only described your intentions with it as polishing a few shortcomings out, but it strikes me as something that could be extended into a more robust combat simulator. Incorporating such things as combat movement and environmental hazards might take too much effort, but pulling units into a combat state and supporting "{Glorious Jeff} attacks {Nightshade} with {Hammer} vs. Parry with {Dagger} - 12 attack dice (9, +4 Excellency, -1 wound penalty) vs. 1 Defense (4, -2 would penalty, -1 Overwhelming penalty)" and similar actions would be an interesting and useful project.

Well, enough geeking out. I'm going to go figure out Urs' code. I look forward to seeing yours after the release... and learning a bit of Kotlin.

[AtG]

Well. I'm in serious need of an Exalted manager, so much so that I've forked Urs' code on Github, to see if I can make something usable of it. In doing my due research, I see you're going to release your manager soon, which is good. It sounds like your code will be available as well; also good. I'll likely fork your repository once you release.

My solution for this stuff, which is far more lightweight (although lacking a core feature) is to just make a spreadsheet that calculates bp from dot allocations (and a separate column for post-gen points with xp costs). Then I just type the charms in manually (and have a simple formula count them for the xp cost (I tag them by ability so I can tell favored / unfavored)).

The main thing is this doesn't give you a nice graphical charm picker. The benefit is it's really really easy and you can just refer to one of the fan-made charm trees.

[Tiberius]

Sorry for the long wait folks; just back on the forums for the first time in a long while, since I had to reorganize my life after getting a new job.

But you're not here for my personal gossip, so I figured I'd give you all an update on what's going on with Anathema Reincarnated. My buddy Kenai didn't want to make a comment about it until it was done, and to be honest, he said that a couple of weeks ago when we thought we were just about to release it, so I think you all are overdue.

It's currently very near to release now, he's just creating a character creation wizard, then we intend to release it to the fanbase so they can help us with charm entering (yes, we have a system based on keywords and effects for entering custom charms) and has mostly been delayed by difficulties determining what programming language to use (Specifically Clojure or Kotlin. Don't ask me for technical details. I couldn't begin to tell you if I tried.)

Other than that, we intend on releasing soon; it's basically going to be his resume for a job with a technical company so he wants to get it out ASAP as well, and Urskr is actually vetting our code and design. Basically it just amounts to he and I having gotten some new jobs lately so it's not been something we've been able to devote all of our time to, but as soon as the wizard is done we can release version 1.0 and start working on features for updates!

Haven't seen any updates since this one... Any news?

[Arian Dynas]

Well I can tell you; it's down now to the wire. Basically there's weapons left to do, put together the default Chronicle file, make extra special babby sure that the system identifies legal characters like it's supposed to, implement saving, then we'll be ready to release version 1.0 for you remarkably patient folks. After that we'll start working on the stuff for 1.1, since we intend to clean up some of the things we're leaving a bit intentionally unfinished so as to get a functional version out to the community ASAP, as well as implement some features we're excited about.

What I can tell you *is* done however, is charms, merits, attributes, abilities, UI design, the combat tracker and a couple other smaller things. Charms really were the biggest bugbear to deal with. Thankfully that's now largely out of the way. so it's downhill from here. We hope to have it ready before year's end, if we can, and we're currently on track to do so, assuming Real Life doesn't intrude again.

[TGUEIROS]

Thank you Arian, it is a great service you all are doing us!

[Kyman201]

Arian Dynas Wow, seriously? That's flipping awesome!

[Arian Dynas]

Thank you Arian, it is a great service you all are doing us!

Hey, hey, don't thank me; I'm just the design and support guy. Yeah I helped him understand how the architecture should look, but Kenai designed the UI and did all the programming; without him there is no Anathema.

[TGUEIROS]

Thanks Kenai! You are awesome!

[MorpheousXO]

Gah! I can't wait for this to come out! I use the currently released combat tracker every time we have a combat, and I can't wait to have access to a better version of it! Thanks so much for making this!

[Nemo_Oceansoul]

im awaiting the completion of this project with baited breath, i may have a group of people who may like to try exalted, i figure something like this should speed up the process of character generation and such =). good work so far im happy to see this project moving forward =)

[Arian Dynas]

Welp, another update of good news; Kenai says he might have it finished ahead of schedule, we're to the point where we're ready to do what we're calling an open beta; validation for PCgen is almost entirely done (we had to scrap the Wizard idea) and right now he's hooking the UI into the functions it does. That's going along swimmingly. I'm going to give it its first QA testing, then if it's solid enough, release to the public to make sure that you guys get something before year's end, and to make sure that we produce something rock solid.

[Nemo_Oceansoul]

Christmas coming early this year then? \^_^/

[Kyman201]

Not gonna lie, my reaction to that was a very undignified squeeing sound!

[wern212]

I just wanted to ask: is there any chance we could get a rough estimate on when this project will be available to the public?
I totally understand if you don't want to say, but I have a group of newer players that could really use a character builder.
We're trying to figure when we'd start our new campaign, and I'd like to know if there's a chance this would be out before then.