Chargen Program for Mongoose Trav

[Vanyon]

Hey all I was wondering about something.

As a project for our local game of Mongoose Traveller a friend and I are working on a chargen program. The program will include everything needed to make characters straight from the main book with no house rules to it.

It wont list the skills or gear descriptions or race descriptions, or reprint any of the book outside of what is needed.

Is it illegal to then post it here for the general populace to use? Or to distribute to the players of my game to allow them to make characters (replacements since their current ones are about to perish :devil: )

There will be no charge for the software and a disclaimer on it to say all copyrights for the material are from Mongoose etc...

So is this OK or no?

 

[Kaveman Koder]

I would recommend contacting them directly. Better to know in advance than do a lot of work and find that you can't share it.

 

[Icosahedron]

I'd ask 'em if they want to buy it. :smirk:

 

[richardtalbotuk]

Mongoose

Based on the strict wording of the Traveller Developer Pack you are best asking permission first from Matt Sprange.

Albeit the SRD may allow you to include the rules elements.

If you maybe offered that it could load templates for their forthcoming other Traveller powered titles (such as the makers of PC Gen do for D&D 3.0/3.5) you might be onto a good thing dependent on how much work you want to generate for yourself?

If it is released I'd find it really useful for easy bulk character generation.

 

[Vanyon]

I am going to contact them after this weekend. My friend and I are working on it this weekend and will see what we can finalize and come up with. that way we have a bit more than ideas and notes sketched out.

I have some screen shots of the initial interface we have done in VB if anyone is inbterested in just seeing those.

 

[Vanyon]

Here are those screen shots. I posted them on photobucket for a bit.

This shows what we have so far with a very basic interface and how it willl lay things out. Chargen options like if you want to use anagathics, or if an event gives you options, will be popups that come up.

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p248/Talofa_bucket/mgtcg1.jpg

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p248/Talofa_bucket/mgtcg2.jpg

As can be seen by the fields and data it will not show any information from the books outside of skill names or key words used to ID planet types etc... Life events and Career events though will be in the database and reported when we set up printing the char sheet.

I will see how we do this weekend. If it becomes something beyond our skills and or free time to make it wont go anywhere. So if we decide we can give it a shot I will email Mongoose and see what they say.

 

[inire]

make it cross-platform and you'll have a new friend

 

[coliver988]

make it cross-platform and you'll have a new friend

They mentioned it was in VB (Visual Basic) so cross-platform is probably out, unless they make it web-based, in which case it could be cross-platform.

However - in looking at the screens thus far, this is going to be pure Windows. If they write it OO-style, however, it would not be hard to port to a web site. As long as they do a 3-tier architecture (logic level, code level, user level essentially) all they would need to update was the UI: make it web-based instead of Win Forms. The actual code would be the same for the back-end and logic, just the UI code gets changed.

Just my 0.02Cr.

 

[Vanyon]

Well we have decided to go with it. So I will be emailing Mongoose tonight.

We were initially using VB to build the GUI and most of the program which would make calls to an access db which held all the tables and info for making the character.

If portability is an issue then we can make a web app out of it. How much interest or need would there be for it to be made a web app for Mac's?

Once we get it a bit farther along I will get some more screen shots.

 

[saundby]

If you don't make it Mac compatible I'll have to write one in Java. Or give it to my class as an assignment. :smirk:

 

[ThunderChilde]

Second vote for Java, and don't write it in MS's variant of Java.