Hi Jay,
To help the continuing discussion of conditions in IT, I have posted two screen grabs of how DM Genie approaches this task here:
http://gallery.rptools.net/v/contrib/drswoboda/
To preface the conversation, I'll say that I don't know what I would change in the DMG implementation of the task. I think it is 'near perfect' in approach and execution in both pre-game and in-game use. Off the top more powerful scripting would be my first request to Janik if he does more updates.
I do understand the area of 'IP' concerning other programmer's ideas, but I think there is plenty here that can be incorporated into IT without someone shouting "rip-off". And it might even be a complement to DMG for getting it so right. And perhaps contacting the DMG author and chatting might make for good PR for both projects.
Any way, that said I have tried what you posted about IT conditions as timers. While I did not get it to actually recognize a condition from modifiers.rpdat, I did get the basic idea behind the concept. And it appears it would work OK.
However, at present, I think IT falls behind DMG in several major areas of conditions display.
The first is how fast things can be set up in real time as the DM runs the combat. DMG wins hands down in that area. One big difference is the super fast ability to "manually" turn on and off a condition in what I would term a manual timer. There is the 'pre-set" conditions panel, which is part of that fast manual mode of DMG. That is a major feature in my mind. There are MANY times I don't need or want a real timer running a condition. Cover, Flanking, Prone, Fatigue, Grappling and LOS come to mind immediately. There are many other times I just want to flip a switch to quickly set a known condition. For setting conditions to multiple combatants, DMG is like IT in that there is a UI dialog when needed.
As part of DMG's condition setting dialog, all the pre-existing conditions are listed in the UI. This is also a major factor to its ease of use.
Custom conditions can be set from the Conditions panel with out having an existing preset at game time. Huge help at times. Later you set up real condition as a preset. There are times when just a text note condition is all you need, with no actual programable effect inacted. This all happens without going to a seperate dialog box like in the current IT setup. I can near instantly set over 20 preset conditions in the time it would take me to setup one or two in IT. This is big time saver during the game. Prior to my using DMG I would skip many uses of conditons in our gaming as it was just too labor intensive to micro manage. With DMG I use them all the time in our games and it is super easy and does 95% of all the work for me as DM.
The amount of visuall feedback in DMG is currently far superior to the current IT setup. This is what most DMs want. More rules feedback. I understand that there are copyright issues, but a real power user will type in as much data as a program will allow them to display.
I like the DMG layout for the combatants better than the current IT. I like the display of the Target, HP, AC/DEF and the notes and conditions for each combatant. The pop up help text is simply wonderful and worth the price of admission alone.
Then there is the display of annotated text with the conditions, visible without having to call a dialog. Simply fantasitc from a DM point of view.
I am still on the fense in how IT displays a timer/condition in its UI. It is an added task in the list. I am talking conditions now. In DMG it is attached to the combatant display, not a new list item. This is a big visual difference. To me this makes more sense and with the DMG display, is easer to see who is affected by what. Either in the notes field, the popup notes, the conditions UI panel on the right, or the view/edit conditions dialog. The location of the timer in the list is less important to me, (assuming the program knows where and when to do its job) than it is too know WHO is affected by the timer/condition and what it is doing in game terms.
In the current IT, there is no visual feedback of who the timer is attached to without opening the timer object. (or is there something I missed?)
I would really like to see a lot of the best parts (heck I'm greedy and want ALL) of DMG conditions in IT. Where the character sheet is now, make this a tabbed area. Now we can flip between the sheet and some combat data pages, like conditions. These pages dynamically update as each combatant is selected like in DMG. So I can flip down the line of creatures and see/set conditions very easily.
A programmer friend of mine always comments about not reinventing the wheel; to look and assimulate the best existing Borg Collective ideas coupled with your great new ideas to make a superb product. For D&D type round and combat tracking, DMG, in my opinion, has set the gold standard. I would love to see IT set the Open Framework standard.
Of course, IT is open ended and DMG is not. It will take a fancy UI to build the conditions panel because the game type will change. But I am sure you guys at RPTools can figure that all out.
I would like to continue this discussion and hear what you and other forum users have to say on these issues. The IT forums have only a small amount of the RPTools traffic in comparision to Map Tool, and I think it deserves far more attention and input as it is, in my opinion, as important, (or even more important) than the mapping tools while running a modern, complex RPG game.
Thanks for the hard work.
-David
