Saturday, September 2, 2017

GURPS Calculator 2.6.1: Power User Update

Version 2.6.1
9/2/2017
Enhancements
  • Are you a poweruser that wants to edit your raw gCalc save by hand instead of having to reimport for every minor change?
    To get started, go to Characters and click the wrench icon next to a character. At the bottom left of the popup, click "Edit Raw Save".
    • Disclaimer: I'm not responsible if you mess up your character. If you do, please re-import it from GCS/GCA.
    • Disclaimer: If you change this by hand, any import from GCS/GCA will overwrite your changes.
Bugs
  • Various Bug Fixes and Style enhancements.

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

GURPS Calculator 2.6: Monster Repository

Click here to go straight to the repository and get started!

The Monster Repository is a database of community submitted characters (PC/NPC/Monster).

Using the filter controls, a user can easily page, filter, and explore the database to find the perfect monster for their next encounter.

One the perfect monster is found, the user can easily copy the monster to their own Characters list by pressing and then confirming at the prompt. The copied Monster will automatically be added to the user's default campaign and will appear on their Characters list. The user is the owner of this copy, and has full permission to change the HP/FP, add tracker rows, and manipulate the attack options.


Adding Monsters to the Respository


Anyone can easily add PCs, NPCs, or Monsters to the Repository in just a few simple steps. There are no rules or guidelines for submitting your monster, just fire up your creativity and share your creation with the world!
  • Go to your characters list.
  • Click on the (wrench) icon on the character you wish to share.
  • In the options popup, add tags using the tags dropdown that describe the character. There is no limit to the number of tags you may use!
  • Check the "Make Character Public" checkbox.
  • Click Save
  • That's it, your character is now public and shared for all to see! Any update you make to your character in the future will automatically be reflected to the version on the Public Database (but not to version that other users have already copied.)


What's Coming up

Patreon Goals


GM Campaign and Session Planner $100 Goal Met!

Once this goal is met, users will be able to create individual "sessions" within a campaign. These sessions will be a collections of "scenes" which the GM can insert associated PCs, NPCs, and Monsters as well as keep track of notes. For example, if you have a dungeon crawl with 3 encounters in it, you could make 3 scenes, and in each scene have the requisite monsters added along with notes on their combat strategies and pre-laid traps. Once that scene arrives in game, you simply open the scene in gCalc and will be able to quickly start combat utilizing the functionality already set down by the "GM Control Board" feature gained at the $80 pledge level.


Encounter Tracker $125

The tool you've all been waiting for (and the most recent goals have been building up to). The Encounter Tracker will exist on the GM Control Board and will allow you to easily track and manage combat scenarios for each scene. When a scene arrives, the Encounter Tracker will autopopulate with all Enemies and PCs in that scene (in speed order of course) and will allow you easily rolls attacks, change initiative order, and track the HP/Fp/Conditions for all.

Attacking Specific Targets $140
With this enhancement, all attacks made by a character or monster that is within the current scene will be able to target any other creature that is also in that scene. This will allow for very fast DR and HP calculations, speeding up combat significantly. For example, a PC may open their "short sword" options and select "orc #3 and "skull". When the player hits attack gCalc will automatically roll the attack, the prompt the gm to select a defense (with optional modifiers) and then roll the defense. If damage is dealt, gcalc will then reduce orc #3's HP, taking into account hit location and wounding multiplier.


Editable Characters $165
Whether you uploaded your character from GCA or GCS, you will be able to now edit your characters live in gCalc!

I am still planning out this feature, but the way it is currently looking is that you will be able to edit any field in gCalc such as Strength or an Attack, as well as have full ability to add and remove items from all lists (skills, equipment, etc). However, any auto-calculations that were done by your character's native app (GCS/GCA) will not work on gCalc, so if you up your Strength, for example, you would need to then go update the fields that rely on Strength manually.

Furthermore, because gCalc does not talk directly with any of these other apps, if you were ever to upload your character again from one of these other apps and overwrite your character you would lose any of the changed data.

This is a very large update with a lot of moving parts, but has been oft requested, even with the caveats set above, and so I am pleased to announce that it is on the roster!

Thursday, December 15, 2016

GURPS Calculator 2.5.2: GM Board Enhancements


Enhancements
  • You can now search skills on the GM Control Board
  • You can now toggle character visibility on the GM Control Board
Bugs
  • Ravens and Pennies Theme fixes
  • Mobile-only "swipe" fix for characters
Feature Removed
  • The "full screen" character format on mobile wasn't playing nice with the rest of the mobile stuff such as swiping for characters. It has been removed until a fix can be implemented. Full screen characters on non-touch devices remains unaffected.

Friday, December 9, 2016

GURPS Calculator 2.5.1: Full screen characters

Enhancements
  • Damage Equation added to Demolitions results 
  • High Rate of Fire is now taken into account on attacks 
  • Help icons with popup help for each page have been added 
  • Enhanced Move on the Jumping Calculator now accepts half levels 
  • Basic Speed added to the GM Board 
  • Characters screen now has a toggle view so that a user may see their entire character on one screen or as a tabbed interface. Simply click in the top right corner of a character's screen. 

Bug Fixes
  • Color fixes for Darkly theme on some screens 
  • Reduced probability of seeing duplicate treasure items during generation 
  • "Reset to Max" HP/FP buttons now hidden on shared characters if user is not the owner 






http://www.gurpscalculator.com/

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

GURPS Calculator 2.5: GM Control Board and Hiking Calculator

GM Control Board 
A collection of everything that is useful to a GM while running your game! To get started, head on over to the GM Control Board section of gCalc and follow the on screen directions.

Not much more to say about it. It's a pretty huge update, but it's easy to understand. Have at it.

Hiking Calculator
Coded by Pseudoboo and with UI by your's truly, the Hiking Calculator should hopefully take some of the sting out of those crunchy hiking discussions.


What's Next?

Patreon Goals

$90 - Character and Monster Database
Once this goal is hit, users will be able to tag characters imported from GCS or GCA as PC/NPC/Monster. Once tagged, all characters can then made "public" (with their default being "private"). All characters that are tagged and made public will be available for other users to browse and use in their own campaigns. The goal here is to create a large, crowd-sourced monster database for everyone to use and enjoy!

$100 - GM Campaign and Session Planner
Once this goal is met, users will be able to create individual "sessions" within a campaign. These sessions will be a collections of "scenes" which the GM can insert associated PCs, NPCs, and Monsters as well as keep track of notes. For example, if you have a dungeon crawl with 3 encounters in it, you could make 3 scenes, and in each scene have the requisite monsters added along with notes on their combat strategies and pre-laid traps. Once that scene arrives in game, you simply open the scene in gCalc and will be able to quickly start combat utilizing the functionality already set down by the "GM Control Board" feature gained at the $80 pledge level.

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

GURPS Calculator 2.4: GCA Importing

GCA Importing

The long awaited GCA Importing feature has been released today. It works by leveraging the "Export to XML" functionality in GCA, which then gives us a file we can upload to gCalc.

It's really simple. To get started uploading your own characters, visit the GCA Character Import page for more details.

What's next?

The Hiking Calculator is our next "breaker" goal, and it's only $1 away. After that the GM Control Board is only $6 away! This will be a huge feature, finally making gCalc useful for GMs in a very real way.

To help get these features rolling, head on over to Patreon and reward me for my hard work for the price of a cup of coffee a month, or if you're generous, the price of a beer a month! Or if you're really generous, the price of a personal pan pizza a month! The possibilities are endless.

Please feed me. :(

In other news

My company was bought out last year, and 10/28 was my final day of work with them after almost 7 years. I get a bit of severance, so I'm not too worried, plenty of time to find a new job. How cool would it be if SJGames would hire me and let me redo their website, forums, and store? It needs a face-lift! If you agree, please hassle them for me. I'm talented, and love GURPS. Let's make it happen. Also, they really do need some dedicated software developers to start moving into the current times. I can do all that too! I know it all. 

Also, if you're not in our GURPS discord yet (it's a chat client) come join us: https://discord.gg/vk5GtQy

Sunday, September 4, 2016

GURPS Calculator: GCA Import Functionality Development Starting!

Over at the gCalc Patreon we have hit our $70/month goal, which means I am beginning development immediately on the GCA character importing functionality!

What can I expect out of this new functionality?
GCA is a whole different beast than GCS. For one it is not open source, so I am not able to alter GCA directly. This means there won't be a clean "Export to GURPS Calculator" menu item that will do the heavy lifting for you. If that is important to you, I encourage you to use the GURPS Character Sheet. If you decide to stay with GCA, you will have an option on the GURPS calculator website to upload your GCA file. Once the file is uploaded, you will be able to treat it just like any other gCalc character (at least, that's the goal).

When can I expect to use this new functionality?
I did some research a few months ago, and the options available for me to code this cleanly are pretty few and far between. I'm hoping to have this functionality done and live by November. I would promise sooner, but I'm getting married October 2nd, so I'm not sure how much free time I'll have. It's totally possible I'll have nothing to do at work for the next few weeks, in which case I'll bang this functionality out faster.

How can I help?
Just because we hit this goal doesn't mean there aren't others! The end is nowhere in sight, and I have many, many plans for gCalc's future. Right now we are at $71. If you were to contribute $4/month, you would help achieve the Hiking Calculator stretch goal, which would be a fully robust hiking calculator using all rules available. Shortly after that at $85 is the Character and Monster Database, which is a way for all users of gCalc to share their GCS and GCA creations with each other in a searchable database, allowing people who need a quick NPC or monster to search and get what they need on the fly.

Of course, if you are uninterested in Patreon and just want to help finance server costs, or just want to buy me some beer, that can be done through gCalc's Paypal.

Thanks for using gCalc!

www.gurpscalculator.com
https://www.patreon.com/codebyclockwork
https://www.paypal.me/codebyclockwork/5

Sunday, August 21, 2016

GURPS Calculator New Server!

GURPS Calculator has had A LOT outages the last 8 months and, every time, I would get on support chat and waste my time going around and around with them about why that may be the case. It always ended up being some "server wide" issue.

Well, this weekend, after 3 days of the calculator being down, I decided enough was enough. I demanded a refund, but in my cancellation request, and moved to a better host.

The new host costs three times more, but they supposedly have better uptime, and the speed of the calculator is noticeably faster.

I suppose we'll see what happens.

In other news, we're closing in on the $70 goal of GCA importing. Besides a few minor bug fixes, I am have been taking a break from gCalc and coding some different things (a discord bot, a scheduling API for discord, my wedding website, etc) and also going to a lot of interviews (trying to find that right fit for my next job since I get laid off in just 2 more short months!)

I promise I'll come back to gCalc soon. The sooner we hit that goal, the sooner I'll switch back over and power through the GCA import functionality!

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Gencon - Meeting Steve Jackson

Today I met Steve Jackson. He signed some stuff for me, and when I mentioned gCalc his face lit up and he said "So that's you!"

Felt good that he had heard of gcalc!

Longer post incoming soon. I've been busy trying to find a new job. @.@

Sunday, July 10, 2016

GURPS Calculator Future Plans

The GURPS Calculator is growing by leaps and bounds with the recent release of GCS importing and character sharing! We have more people than ever using gCalc, which is a great privilege for me!

Awhile back I realized that servers cost money, and although I love working on the GURPS Calculator, I cannot spend all of my time on it. Patreon became the goto solution for this problem, and I have since tied all major enhancements to Patreon goals, which allow you, and other users, to help fund the major features of gCalc! I spend dozens of hours on each of these features, and every cent contributed goes towards paying server costs, domain name costs, and coercing my programmer friends to help by offering them pizza and beer.

At the moment, after Patreon takes it's modest cut, I am at $63/month. With how much time I spend on gCalc, this means I "profit" about $1.20 per hour after paying server costs. That $1.20 is what goes towards pizza and beer and I thank you!

So why this big pitch on Patreon? Why explain how it effects me in so much detail? Well, like I said before, all major enhancements are tried to Patreon. I will continue to work on bugs and minor enhancements as normal (anywhere from 10-30 hours a month, depending on how broken everything is) as well as answer the weirdly numerous questions I get over email, but will no longer be working on the major enhancements that force me to ramp up those hours up to 50 or so a month until the Patreon goal is met. My personal goal is to not dip below working on gCalc for less than $1/hour for my own sanity. Help me stay sane!

So with all of that out of the way, what's coming up for gCalc?
As listed on Patreon, the goals, their descriptions, and their goal amount are as follows:

Current Monthly: $63

Previous Goals already met:

  • $5   - Server costs
  • $15 - Trait Sorter
  • $20 - Treasure Generator
  • $25 - Demolitions Calculator
  • $30 - GCS Importing and Character Screens
  • $60 - Character Sharing


Future Goals:

$70 - GCA Importing
When this goal is hit we will create a way to import your GURPS Character Assistant characters to gCalc! Because GCA is not open-source, this will not be as clean a solution as GCS, but it is doable. It will probably work by taking your gca save file and uploading it to our server, where we will convert it to a gCalc character. Once it's uploaded, all GCA characters will act as gCalc characters just like GCS characters do now.

$75 - Hiking Calculator
Be able to calculate long distance travel easily. Includes the optional romping rules from Hi Tech!

$80 - GM Control Board and Campaign/Character Associations
A nice interface where the GM will can track all relevant player stats! Once a GM creates a campaign and the players in the game associate their imported GCS characters with said campaign, the GM can visit the Control Board easily see and roll against all player skills and stats. Here, the GM will also be able to set up combat scenarios and track whose turn it is, current HP and FP, and much more.

$85 - Character and Monster Database
Once this goal is hit, users will be able to tag characters imported from GCS or GCA as PC/NPC/Monster. Once tagged, all characters can then made "public" (with their default being "private"). All characters that are tagged and made public will be available for other users to browse and use in their own campaigns. The goal here is to create a large, crowd-sourced monster database for everyone to use and enjoy!

$90 - GM Campaign and Session Planner
Once this goal is met, users will be able to create individual "sessions" within a campaign. These sessions will be a collections of "scenes" which the GM can insert associated PCs, NPCs, and Monsters as well as keep track of notes. For example, if you have a dungeon crawl with 3 encounters in it, you could make 3 scenes, and in each scene have the requisite monsters added along with notes on their combat strategies and pre-laid traps. Once that scene arrives in game, you simply open the scene in gCalc and will be able to quickly start combat utilizing the functionality already set down by the "GM Control Board" feature gained at the $80 pledge level.



Help make these goals a reality! Donate on Patreon now!
Are you a developer and want to help? Email me!
www.gurpscalculator.com