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Software Development

R

RixRacer

SOC-9
I just embarked on writing an application for the generation of characters. Unfortunately I chose Traveller TNE to use as a guide for the process. I did this solely because I could immediately get my hands on the TNE manuals. I do not get the impression that this version of the game is widely played anymore. Which leads me to my questions:

1. Am I right in my assumptions that TNE, although a fun and challenging exercise, is not a practical platform for the majority of Traveller players?

2. Is T5 the right one?

3. Would it be of interest to anyone to have a Character Generation sysem (NPC and PC) for T5 or another edition?

4. What other tools could I incorporate into the application that would make it worth everyone's while?

Thanks in advance for you comments!!!
 
Are you Just saying that?

Are you saying that because T5 is new, or becuase you think it will be the most successful?

Just curious.

BTW: I just ordered the T5 CD-ROM
 
Because T5 Rocks!

RixRacer said:
Are you saying that because T5 is new, or becuase you think it will be the most successful?

Just curious.

BTW: I just ordered the T5 CD-ROM
Click to expand...
To me it's starting to really come together as a whole system. It jells nice. Well, back to dinner. :D
 
New Site

For all who care:

I just purchased a new domain http://www.travellersoft.com. I plan to host this site to further the development of Traveller tools and utilities. I am not a web developer per se but I think I can get it up and running in a couple of weeks (Just the basics) and improve it over time. This will be more of a collaboration site than anything else. I will explain what my evil plan is. :devil:

A bit of my history:

I am thirty - ah-um years old and there was a time where RPGs were a big part of my life. Many years have passed and I got out of gaming due to life choices. However, there is a still a deep interest in RPG still today. I guess, like the rest of the members of this site, the youngsters want to play a bigger role in the adult world.

I have been into programming since I was in seventh grade and RPGs were always a big part of the motivations. Limitations of the computers and my understanding of them gave me more obstacles than I had solutions for. As I developed my talent in programming (if you want to call it that) the computer and programming languages have gotten a lot more sophisticated and fortunately I have not made as much of a transition.

Although I am not a programmer by trade (any more), it still is a passion like RPGs once were. Therefore I am no longer going to resist and willing to see were this will take me.

One thing I will tell everyone, I love collaborating on things like this, because what makes RPGs SO MUCH BETTER that the computer-base MMORPGs is that they are open to interpretation in every way.

In my initial post I used a Character Generator as an example. I really don't want to limit it to that eventhough that will, and should be, a big part of it. What I want to breath into existance is a Traveller Companion system that will allow players and referees to plan campaigns, worlds, ships, cities, systems, players, etc from one application. I would also like there to be a data exchange piece that will allow gamers to pass along data from there system to another players system. Eventually allowing players and refs to play online via chat or over the phone...etc

Hopefully you all get the picture.
 
Close your tags...

Dude, you need to put the first <html> tag at the very top of the page. :oo:

Right now it's nothing but the source, minus the first tag. Now I shall go and read the rest of the post....

Oh, btw, since you are now a proud member of the T5 owners, nudge DonM for your Traveller 5 Private Forum Hall Pass and come on down with this. As I understand Coliver is working on some T5ware as well.

'Sides I can always use another guinea pig. :devil:

EDIT: Yep, get your Hall Pass. Same idea I was thinking of, a Traveller Software Suite. I like it so far.
 
Last edited:
Jim

Surely part of the fun is creating the character! I have written one to produce starsystems, now THAT IS drudgery, except that now I can create a sector by three clicks of the mouse!
 
Magnus Thornwood said:
Dude, you need to put the first <html> tag at the very top of the page. :oo:

Right now it's nothing but the source, minus the first tag. Now I shall go and read the rest of the post....

Oh, btw, since you are now a proud member of the T5 owners, nudge DonM for your Traveller 5 Private Forum Hall Pass and come on down with this. As I understand Coliver is working on some T5ware as well.

'Sides I can always use another guinea pig. :devil:

EDIT: Yep, get your Hall Pass. Same idea I was thinking of, a Traveller Software Suite. I like it so far.
Click to expand...


Looks fine for me...not sure where the tag is missing
 
Sector Creation

jameswaterfield said:
Surely part of the fun is creating the character! I have written one to produce starsystems, now THAT IS drudgery, except that now I can create a sector by three clicks of the mouse!
Click to expand...

I may be asking for your advise on the creation of sectors...That is not something I have even thought about to this point. :)
 
Oh, and if you haven't already done so it would be a good idea to drop Marc a line telling him about this. I'm sure he won't object, but it's best to keep him in the loop.
 
RixRacer said:
I just embarked on writing an application for the generation of characters. Unfortunately I chose Traveller TNE to use as a guide for the process. I did this solely because I could immediately get my hands on the TNE manuals. I do not get the impression that this version of the game is widely played anymore. Which leads me to my questions:

1. Am I right in my assumptions that TNE, although a fun and challenging exercise, is not a practical platform for the majority of Traveller players?

2. Is T5 the right one?

3. Would it be of interest to anyone to have a Character Generation sysem (NPC and PC) for T5 or another edition?

4. What other tools could I incorporate into the application that would make it worth everyone's while?

Thanks in advance for you comments!!!
Click to expand...

TNE was the last truly successful edition before 2008's Mongoose Traveller. It still has a strong fanbase, but that tends not to be well represented here.

The "conversions" (GT, T20, H4T) are not entirely compatible (but T20 ship and vehicle design is CT compatible); each has a strong fanbase as well.

T5 is not yet finalized. doing anything for it is premature, IMO.

Mongoose specifically excluded software from the open license provisions of the Traveller Logo License; you have to negotiate with them to get permission, or base solely upon the SRD.

Me? I want MGT or MegaTrav...
... CGen, Trade, and sysgen.

I could write the latter two, but I'm too lazy to make them pretty (I code lately in basic or python).
 
Last edited:
aramis said:
TNE was the last truly successful edition before 2008's Mongoose Traveller. It still has a strong fanbase, but that tends not to be well represented here.

The "conversions" (GT, T20, H4T) are not entirely compatible (but T20 ship and vehicle design is CT compatible); each has a strong fanbase as well.

T5 is not yet finalized. doing anything for it is premature, IMO.

Mongoose specifically excluded software from the open license provisions of the Traveller Logo License; you have to negotiate with them to get permission, or base solely upon the SRD.

Me? I want MGT or MegaTrav...
... CGen, Trade, and sysgen.

I could write the latter two, but I'm too lazy to make them pretty (I code lately in basic or python).
Click to expand...


Thanks for your input. You are correct in that TNE doesn't seem to be well represented on this site. I have been long separated from Traveller since MegaTraveller. I seem to remember a MegaTraveller PC Game that was written and I had a chance to play, but that was about the end of it.

I will try to give Marc Miller a heads up on that--as I already had thought of doing so. I strongly believe that the creator should get as much say and rights as possible to any spin-off directly related to the creation--but that you for the reminder to do so more sooner than later.

If you are interested, I have the "coming soon" page up on the domain. http://www.travellersoft.com/ It is just a pretty coming soon page...no content yet.

I will consider creating a utility for Megatraveller for character generation depending on how close it is to T5...I think, if I remember correctly, it is closer to Classic Traveller than TNE...I still don't know what T5 looks like, so, like Florida, I can't make the call yet.

I, too, program in basic (MS Visual Basic) and haven't really touched on python (although I know it is good in the web environments) I have been playing with ROR (Ruby on Rails) a little.

Architecturally speaking, these utilities that I am thinking about are definately suited for the desktop application and can easily be accomplished with Visual Basic. The harder part is data (mostly base data) you can't require or assume users will have MSAccess, SQL Server, MySQL, etc. So whatever stored the dormant base data until needed has to be portable and deployable within the setup of the utility application. I am probably going to use a third party database system called VistaDB (eventhough everything with vista in it seems to run slow) However, apparently, the footprint is very small with very little limitations in the free version. It also supports TSQL (which isn't really important) it is also portable to Mac OS and linux.

Anyway, there seem to be enough interest for me to move forward and that is what I will do. I may ask you, sometime in the future, for you input on specific components.

Thanks again for the comments.
 
RixRacer said:
...
Architecturally speaking, these utilities that I am thinking about are definately suited for the desktop application and can easily be accomplished with Visual Basic. The harder part is data (mostly base data) you can't require or assume users will have MSAccess, SQL Server, MySQL, etc. So whatever stored the dormant base data until needed has to be portable and deployable within the setup of the utility application. I am probably going to use a third party database system called VistaDB (eventhough everything with vista in it seems to run slow) However, apparently, the footprint is very small with very little limitations in the free version. It also supports TSQL (which isn't really important) it is also portable to Mac OS and linux.

Anyway, there seem to be enough interest for me to move forward and that is what I will do. I may ask you, sometime in the future, for you input on specific components.

Thanks again for the comments.
Click to expand...

there are various free SQL DBs out there, and in fact, MS finally broke down a couple of years ago and released a desktop version of SQL for free use. If you use VB.Net (I use C# due to work) then the DB access is really, really easy. I've just not figured out (or taken the time to do so) how to add that requirement to the installer & create the empty DBs. Which is why the stuff I do write for Traveller (and may eventually finish [although I did get the regex stuff to work, so my cargo pgm now should work with the various SEC files which, despite being a fixed width file, are not all the SAME fixed widths....]) uses XML as the backend for data storage, or just plain text files, depending on the usage.

Not having a Vista machine I've no idea how well that would work, but I would assume MS would have better APIs to access their own DB.

Oh - and I looked at your page as well on FireFox and just got the text, no HTML.

Just my 0.2Cr...
 
RixRacer: your page is not loading correctly; it's serving the HTML as text.
 
Travellersoft.com not working

As I stated before, I am not a web developer per se. It looks fine through my browser (IE) I don't have firefox. Interesting, though...never had a simple page show so many errors...probably just a missing tag. Using dreamweaver CS3

Thanks for pointing out the problem.
 
coliver988 said:
there are various free SQL DBs out there, and in fact, MS finally broke down a couple of years ago and released a desktop version of SQL for free use. If you use VB.Net (I use C# due to work) then the DB access is really, really easy. I've just not figured out (or taken the time to do so) how to add that requirement to the installer & create the empty DBs. Which is why the stuff I do write for Traveller (and may eventually finish [although I did get the regex stuff to work, so my cargo pgm now should work with the various SEC files which, despite being a fixed width file, are not all the SAME fixed widths....]) uses XML as the backend for data storage, or just plain text files, depending on the usage.

Not having a Vista machine I've no idea how well that would work, but I would assume MS would have better APIs to access their own DB.

Oh - and I looked at your page as well on FireFox and just got the text, no HTML.

Just my 0.2Cr...
Click to expand...


Noted: However VistaDB is NOT a Microsoft product. It is a third-party product that competes with MS SQL CE (Compact Edition). As a matter of fact, it is way more powerful with a smaller footprint. It even seems to be small than a MS Acess database. The problem with MS Access is and always has been deployment. The latest version of Access is a different API than the previous versions. so you would have to write code to support multiple versions of access or require the user have the latest or previous versions. I have written code that creates a blank database and fills in seed data via text files during the installation process or the first use process, but agan, you need to support the multiple versions or limit it to a specific version both of which is painful for the end user.

VistaDB is an embedded engine that you package with an application and makes it more portable (originally designed for PocketPC or mobile PC applications). Additionally, VistaDB is currently able to be ported to Mac OS and linux. VistaDB does not have a requirement of having Windows Vista. It works on Windows XP, Server, etc. And looks to be seemless to the end user. MS SQL CE is built the same way but only for the wondows-based platforms. It is also a bit more limited (no stored procedures, etc.)

Thanks
 
Site fixed

aramis said:
RixRacer: your page is not loading correctly; it's serving the HTML as text.
Click to expand...

It actually was a site configuration issue. I did not install the PHP Hypertext preprocessor (which IE has built-in) It should come up for Firefox browsers now.

Now, does anyone know how to contact Marc Miller?
 
Try emailing him at farfuture -at- farfuture -dot- net.

He's pretty busy with development of T5, but I think he'll want to discuss what you have in mind (just a personal opinion, I don't know the man personally).
 
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