A question of modding.

[Silverfox2112]

Greetings and Salutations to all.

First chance I actually got to say hi to the community since I joined. So HI! Also, really excited to see there are some PbeM games going on and some still lingering Gorgan's Alliance, very Kosher. So after downloading the game once more, running through and remembering all that I thought was long gone.. I crawled into my attic, grabbed all my old books, flipped them open, called the friends, pulled out the 400 pg. manuscript we added for the rest of the world we created and now... Got a question.

Did Sierra ever succeed in bringing out the other lands for Gorgan's Alliance? I haven't found a reference for it on the net but frankly I haven't look very hard. Second, if we decide to go through the painstaking course of rebuilding (if we have to, creating), coding and fleshing out a new map, visuals, quests and all, so be it, but to cut some corners.. were there ever adventure editors? Large scale map editors? (seen the one on download page, fun but not cutting it for the project) Or do we have to try and get an SDK or recode for the build? The idea is, none of us really got into the play-by-email. We are the table toppers for sure. But we can do computer games and since a couple of us actually have some experience in the field, after digging up all the material again, we feel its just a damn shame it wasn't completed. Any help or direction you guys could point us to would be 'greatly' appreciated.

Thanks.

[AndrewTall]

Hi! :)

I think that Sierra canceled the series they planned after GA - I think that they wanted to focus on more mass-market games. I've certainly never heard of a sequel and I'm pretty sure that it would have been mentioned on the site if it had ever existed. There were several updates to the original program though, I think most of those are on br.net.

I did some searching for downloads a while back, and didn't find a lot - many dead links and non-functional files but nothing really active.


What I'd have loved was a DM's version of the interactive map for use in PBEM - tracking army location, holding levels, auto-calculating movement costs, keeping track of domain action interactions (player A logs on a bids 5 RP with a descriptor, player B counter bids 4 RP with a descriptor, the GM logs on and adjusts for the descriptors and either rolls or allows another round, etc). It would make the PBEM much easier from a book-keeping perspective - an online tabletop with chat ability and dice rolls made a huge difference to Rjurik Winds and made adventures quite practicable in many respects.

Actually just being able to print out the map with various layers for province borders, holding levels, etc would be great as otherwise you only have static maps and need to keep overwriting them.

[Silverfox2112]

Yea, finally looked around the net and found one reference that the expansions were planned but ultimately dropped. Shame. But yea, about the idea of the interactive map for the DM would be quite nice and shouldn't be that hard of a thing to take care of. I'll talk to my C++ guru (I just run the games and on the comp, do the script modding and visuals.) But yea, if you had that.. something that players could look in on, Like taking a cut pic of their domain and emailing them at the end of their turn, it would make PBeM, alot more appealing.

Josh, the C++ guy I was just speaking of has the beautiful idea that he can break in and change the code to see if we can add the rest of Cerelia to the map. Thanks for the info. If we can do one or the other I will most defiantly let you know.

[Vicente]

Hi! :)
What I'd have loved was a DM's version of the interactive map for use in PBEM - tracking army location, holding levels, auto-calculating movement costs, keeping track of domain action interactions (player A logs on a bids 5 RP with a descriptor, player B counter bids 4 RP with a descriptor, the GM logs on and adjusts for the descriptors and either rolls or allows another round, etc). It would make the PBEM much easier from a book-keeping perspective - an online tabletop with chat ability and dice rolls made a huge difference to Rjurik Winds and made adventures quite practicable in many respects.

Actually just being able to print out the map with various layers for province borders, holding levels, etc would be great as otherwise you only have static maps and need to keep overwriting them.

I've played for a looong time with the idea of doing some short of that DM program (in .NET), but it always dies for the same reasons:

- I don't have a clear idea on what the program really needs to do, so I get lost on design decisions.
- So, as I'm lost, I get bored :p

I have right now a generic system to handle D20 "abstract objects", with their attributes, modifiers, everything totally flexible (new attributes and modifiers can be added on the fly and so on), and that handles D20 system calculations (how modifiers stack and so on).

I'm now adding a way of define those objects via XML, but for the "graphic" part (a WPF app, so I force myself to learn WPF) I have to learn quite a lot, and for the Client-Server design I have no idea on how to approach it yet...