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I've found an Initiative tracker that rocks and is Java and is open source!
"Initiative is a program for tracking the initiatives of players in a D&D 3rd edition game.
It has many features including:
Tracking of initiative for players and NPCs
Refocusing, changing initiatives
Importing characters from PCGen
A summary of combats screen for easy experience point totals, as well as tracking importan combat events
Tracking of spells, including duration.
Hit Point tracking, including bleeding, stabilization, death and raising
Pre-generate encounters, and save them for future use. Support for tokens, Intented to tie Miniatures to particular combatants in large combats"
Well, it comes with source, but the README says that it's copyrighted. That's sometimes the problem when people write stuff and "publish" it and just slap their copyright on it.
It's even worse when they randomly slap the GPL on it, but that's a different story.
Actually, I'm not against the program at all I just couldn't use it as a starting point since the code is copyrighted.
But by all means, it looks like it can provide good initiative functionality. And could give us a good measure of features to go by when we look at building an integrated initiative tracker.
I think everyone should download and give it a try, find what you like and don't like, and post them here, or as a new post in New Tools.
Initiative is just a stat. I want the ability to have a panel like this with whatever stats (or states in rptrollish) displayed in a grid like this that I can edit and sort with the ability to highlight an entry so I know where I'm at in the list.
So I would say forget calling it an intiative panel Call is a state panel or a combat panel with the docs showing initiative as an example. In the macro section, you can describe how to set hp and initiative, and initiative modifer states on a token then how roll initiative and update the state of the token so it appears in the state panel.
My point is not to tie maptool to d20 too much so it is usable for the next big thing in gaming. (whatever that is)
/me steps down off soap box
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the RPTrolls are readying another attack of proposed functionality on the developers.
1. Adding characters is awkward. Initiative bonus and HP are a slider??? The max HP starts at 100, there is a preference to change it -- but why a slider?
2. When there's not an init >= 20 in the roll, it stops at 20 at the top of every turn.
3. Because of the pitfall of keeping track of the current initiative, in order to interrupt someone's turn (Ready or Delayed actions in d20), the GM will have to edit a lot of initiative scores (at least the current actor and the one he is replacing -- up to all of them in some rare cases).
4. 'Roll' rolls for all (and starts a new combat, first round) but 'Reroll' only rolls for current character. Could use some tooltips or better button names here.
5. Dialogs with both text boxes and sliders is generally bad, I don't want to switch back and forth to the mouse too often. In this case the sliders can be manipulated with arrow keys, but then the save and cancel buttons can't be activated with 'Enter'.
6. Ties in initiative are randomly ordered. Though it highlights all the tied rows on their initiative.
7. I like the combat log, not necessarily how it's displayed, but the idea of keeping a log of the actions is nice.
8. Adding spells to the initiative is a nice effect too -- many spells have a component that needs to happen on its (your) initiative.
9. Ability to hide columns is a nice touch. Doesn't go as far as rkathey suggested, but I can hide the columns that annoy me the most.
10. No way to save the current combat.
11. No initiative scores below 1 allowed.
12. Loading brings in characters with a 0 initiative, but they're skipped. So when you load you need to be willing to 'Roll' or select all the new chars and 'Reroll'.
13. Several actions only allow one status at a time (bleeding). Plus, although you can 'kill' and 'raise' them with other status tags, they will be overwritten.
