Alpha 15 May Be the Last Alpha

December 19, 2010

Saturday night, my gaming group took Alpha-15 for a spin. There were a couple issues related to…well, related to my coding on Alpha-15 until 10 minutes before game time. Despite that, EpicTable pretty much stayed out of the way and just let us play, which is my heuristic for beta worthiness. I’m addressing those couple issues, and then I have some mapping work to finish. At that point, I’ll transition to beta.

One concession I’m making to time–I’m going to start the beta before the vision-related tools are integrated. I know, for some of you that’s going to be a downer, and I won’t feel bad if you want to wait for the vision support. There’s a lot of functionality that’s in pretty decent shape, though, and starting early with people who aren’t as concerned about vision will give me a gentler beta ramp.

I’m going to start reaching out to folks over the next few days to gauge interest in beta 1. Stay tuned.

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Alphas 13 & 14

December 12, 2010

I’ve been hard at work on EpicTable, trying to make good on that prediction of a Fall beta. (Hey, I have until the 21st! )

We tested out Alpha 13 and 14 today/tonight. Alpha 13 fixed the character transfer issue from Alpha 12, and it reintroduced some long locked-down UI customization capabilities like changing the visibility of the chat, character portrait bar, and dice tray, dragging panels to secondary monitors, etc.

Brennen, who’s on a smaller display, has been needing that auto-hide feature for the various EpicTable panels, and immediately noticed that the panels were slow on his machine. That was this morning (um…Saturday morning, that is) on Alpha 13. By this evening, Alpha 14 was born, and its auto-hide panels are considerably snappier.

I have a few things I still want to take care of before the beta, but some of you die-hards are apt to hear from me before I’m officially past my Fall deadline.

For those of you interested in the kinds of things going on in the alpha tests, the release notes for the alphas are actually here on the site: http://www.epictable.com/whats-new/

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Alphas 11 and 12

November 21, 2010

Due to a variety of work and family conflicts, my group had a longish break between tests. (And yes, I know, if that happens again, I should pull in some of you folks who have offered to wade into the alpha fray. )

I had my own set of conflicting priorities, though, so the extra time didn’t hurt. I posted Alpha-11 to my group on the 19th in anticipation of testing Friday night. However, Friday night before the test, I fixed some things related to handouts. So, I quick spun up an Alpha-12 while the guys waited patiently, and that’s what we ended up testing.

Here are some highlights of the delta between Alpha-10 and Alpha-12:

  • I fixed “Brennen’s Terrible Scrolling Problem” – scrolling stopped prematurely on Brennen’s small(er) laptop screen than on my test screens.
  • I eliminated the “Tribble Notes” – notes that cloned every time they moved.
  • I fixed an issue with the installer that was causing it to not update an existing installation.
  • I fixed some things with character edits and character portrait transfer.
  • There are better “wait” screens now than there used to be, for things like waiting for the game organizer to join, retrieving game resources, etc. There’s still not as much feedback as I’d like, but it’s better than it was. For the trivia fans out there, the splash screen is actually the same image used for the EpicTable banner we had in the Gen Con booth this year.
  • There’s a nice self-extracting exe for the installer now, so there’s no need to go through the hassle of opening a zip file, wondering if you should extract the files first, and then wondering whether you should run setup.exe or the .msi file. There’s just a single exe. You run it. The product installs. Simple.

The really good (from a glass half-full perspective) things to come out of tonight’s test:

  • There are things wrong with character portrait transfer that just aren’t misbehaving in my lab. (The glass half-full part about that is that I wouldn’t have found this without the alpha testers, and the rest of you would have been hit with it in the beta.) This is curious–since the server is central, it doesn’t really matter much whether two clients are in my house or across the world from each other. So, I don’t yet have a satisfactory explanation for why character portraits work so well for me.
  • Something’s not right with the auto-updater. I wonder if my installer “fix” has anything to do with this….

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Alpha 10

October 30, 2010

Last Sunday, Brennen and I took Alpha 10 for a spin. We verified that the dire problems of Alpha 9 were fixed, tried out a new self-extracting installer in development.

The self-extracting installer was something I did as a break from other things, and it’s complete in Alpha 11. I only spent on hour or two on it, but it’s really motivating to me to do “finish work” like this. The gist is that the setup.exe and MSI are bundled into a single, self-extracting executable, so there’s no wondering which file to run, unzipping to temporary directories, or anything like that. Not 100% necessary, but consistent with the ease of use goals of EpicTable.

The Dire Problems, as you might recall, were the Ever-Changing Background and some weirdnesses with rich text notes. Both have been eliminated. You still get backgrounds, now you just don’t get them every two seconds. ;) Rich text notes no longer cause mysterious “drag and drop registration errors”.

We did find a couple things of interest. Brennen was having scrolling problems that I couldn’t duplicate for the life of me. He uses a laptop with rather less screen real estate than I’d imagined, and runs at a lower resolution than I do, so we spent some time trying to get my secondary monitor setup to mimic his. I still wasn’t able to duplicate the problem that night, but later, I found I could duplicate it on my own laptop, so…something about laptops is more nuanced than just screen size and resolution. That’s what I’m working on now. At least now that I’ve been able to duplicate it, the bug can’t hide for long.

Running at this resolution has really made me thankful that there’s so much ability to customize the layout in EpicTable. (I need to record a video of that….)

Alpha 11, targeted for this week, will have fixes for these two issues from Alpha 10, a fix to character portrait and handout sharing, and the finished self-extracting installer. There are probably some other things I’m forgetting, but I need to leave something for the Alpha 11 post. ;)

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Field Report: EpicTable Alpha-9

October 3, 2010

EpicTable Alpha-9 is a good example of why I’m releasing alphas (almost) weekly to my gaming group to stabilize things before giving the rest of you a beta.

I was pretty excited about Alpha-9. It had a lot of improvements and fixes–things you can work around but would never want to release. Everything was working really well in my testing–though granted, the alpha releases get very little–and I was looking forward to wowing my group. Our Monday game night rolled around and BAM! Three really nasty things hit us that didn’t occur in my own lab.

First, rich text notes, when sent over the network, resulted in a scary looking message about “drag and drop registration failure”. Hmm…. Second, Bryan found that he could crash Brennen’s EpicTable by editing a note at the same time Brennen did. Fun. These two were both relatively easy fixes and were due to the same cause. You developers out there are probably guessing that this was caused by simultaneous access to the note by the GUI and the incoming change notification, and you’d be right. It was a little more nuanced than that, but in essence, that’s what happened, and that’s fixed.

The third and final nail in the coffin of this build: The Miraculous, Ever-changing Background. If you changed the background of the tabletop, you kept changing it. Forever. And everyone told everyone else about the background change. Forever. Okay, so I’m not entirely incompetent. I had mechanisms in place that were supposed to prevent that. They…um…just didn’t. (I deleted my long-winded explanation of what was really going on, and instead, put that in my bug database. If you’re interested, let me know.)

So, why am I going on about the tragic Alpha-9 release? It’s to illustrate the distinction I’m making between alpha and beta, and to help explain why the alpha is closed and I’m making the beta contingent on the alpha’s stabilizing. The Alpha-9 problems were difficult to reproduce in my environment but outright killed our Monday gaming session. I know how tough it is to keep a gaming group going, and I don’t want give you a evening-killing bug. I’m sure there will be issues that come up with the beta, and I know you guys will be helpful and gracious as we work through them together, but I’m going to be respectful of your gaming time and do what I can to prevent evening-killers like Alpha-9 getting into the beta.

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Alpha 8

September 15, 2010

No, you didn’t miss anything. I haven’t started the beta yet, and the alpha is really just my own gaming group. However, I thought I’d give you an update on how things are going. I don’t want to rub salt into any “give it to me now!” wounds you might have, and that’s part of why I’m just now telling you that I’m on my 8th alpha build, but I know you’re curious, so….
Read more

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Absurdly Pleased by EpicTable’s Windows Conformity

August 29, 2010

Sometimes, on a project of this scope, done entirely in spare time, the little things matter more than you’d expect. In alpha-7 (yes, I’ve subjected my gaming group to 7 builds of EpicTable), the setup failed to install some resources. Technically, all the previous setups failed to do that, but since everyone had been just auto-updating since before there was a setup, no one noticed. In fixing that, I couldn’t help but be absurdly pleased with EpicTable’s new logo, sitting there, looking at home next to all my other apps–looking better than some that didn’t have the hi-res icons used by Windows 7.

There was a similar moment when I was installing and Windows presented its less scary setup warning–blue border instead of yellow, and “publisher verified as Realityforge” instead of “unknown publisher”. Signing the setup and other binaries lets Windows ask you if you care if Realityforge installs software, as opposed to that shady-looking ne’er-do-well, “unknown publisher”.

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Dice Rolls Integrated

June 29, 2010

Last time, I showed you EpicTable’s dice roll editor. Since then, I’ve integrated it into the rest of EpicTable. This video demonstrates a number of dice rolls–on the tabletop, ad-hoc rolls to the chat window, and the shortcut gallery for rolls created with the dice roll editor.

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

First Flight

June 25, 2010

Last night, my group’s regular Thursday night game was disrupted by one player absent and another delayed. But there’s a silver lining to this story. We took EpicTable out for an initial spin instead of playing!

No, it’s not quite ready for prime time, but the basics–chat, dice rolling, game formation, local tabletop interaction–worked pretty well. Even handouts “worked” if you call showing up at the other participants’ computers as a base64 encoded blob in the log “working”.

The new messaging layer, which has contributed to much of the delay in getting EpicTable out the door, performed flawlessly–which is to say, it was invisible. No port forwarding, no messing with firewalls, no mysterious disconnects.

Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty missing–I hadn’t planned to use it quite yet, so there were still buttons going nowhere, there was no installer, some tabs that were experimental were visible; but for a first flight, it wasn’t too bad. While I’ve “shown” EpicTable a lot via shared screen demos, I’ve never actually put it in the hands of anyone else before now. Thanks go to the guys in my gaming group for pushing me off the cliff while I was still talking about the imperfections in my wings.

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Dice Roll Editor Screencast

June 17, 2010

One of my goals for EpicTable is to allow you to play pretty much any RPG you want to play. Part of meeting that goal is supporting rich dice mechanics. If you’re rolling 3d6 or 1d20+5, you can just type that, but many games out there have some pretty interesting dice mechanics that really aren’t practical to enter as text.

Enter the Dice Roll Editor. This editor allows you to build a really wide variety of complex dice rolls. You can save these for easy access later, and ultimately, I’ll integrate the Dice Roll Editor with the Character Sheet Editor, and then you’ll really see something cool. But for now, I’d like to show you how to build a dice roll using the editor.

Actually, I’ll show you how to build several interesting rolls. Here’s a quick catalog:

  1. D&D attack roll (simple sum with modifier)
  2. D&D stat creation roll (“keep 3″ and “reroll 1s”)
  3. World of Darkness “9-again” roll (spawning and success counting)
  4. Don’t Rest Your Head, Discipline/Exhaustion/Madness roll (multiple dice pools of different color, success counting)
  5. My Life with Master roll to “resist the master” with Desperation (multiple dice pools of different die types, “drop 4s”)

I spent some time gathering screenshots, but while a picture may be worth a thousand words, in this case, a video is worth a thousand pictures. So, rather than a horde of screenshots, I have a screencast for you. Let me know what you think. Also, let me know what you think about the length of the screencast too. This one is just over 13 minutes. I have a feeling it should be a little shorter, so some of the later screencasts are apt to be more bite-sized–in the 2-5 minute range.

Credits and Sources: Die images and music by Brennen Reece.

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

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