Next bigger construction areas

While I am taking care of minor bugs in Genesis 4 release candidates, I am already planning my next bigger tasks that need taking care of:

• Reworked Splittermond character generation code
  "Splittermond" was the first RPG supported. RPGs supported later in Genesis improved the generation code from the lessons learned from their predecessors. Still the majority of Genesis users use it because of "Splittermond" and it is about time to improve the generation code. I already have some ideas and goals, but it is a major overhaul.

• Switch from XML-based data to SQL-based data
  Loading and parsing XML code distributed among several compressed files isn't the fasted way to load the data of core rules and supplements. The more supplements you get, the longer it takes to start the application. Switching to a database format, like a file bases SQL format, might improve this.
  Also, other team members said they would be able to provide a webfrontend for entering data, which would improve the situation for non-programmer team members a lot.

• Downloadable adventure data
  Currently each Genesis realease comes bundled with information about published adventures and their covers, to help build the character development pages. The cover images already significantly increase the applications download size. Like for the SQL-based data, an online service providing these information might be easier to contribute to and still provide the same benefit.

• Switch to Java 11
  Java 8, which is our current requirement, isn't the latest Java version anymore. While still being supported until end of 2020, most users will download Java 11 now. Unfortunately Java 11 does not contain JavaFX anymore, which Genesis makes heavy use of. JavaFX has become an open source project and is under active development, but to make use of it, Genesis needs to make the switch to a modular Java application. And to still be easy to install, Genesis needs to be bundled with its own JRE, which means that we have to build binaries for the major plattforms (Windows, OS X, Linux). 

I did not decide yet what I will do and in which order. Switching to Java 11 needs to be done anyway - the earlier, the better. The other points are nice to haves, which I need to sort to my liking.
There are still other work items, that need to be done: improve the Shadowrun 5 User Interface and provide Google Drive support to name two. But since I am intimidated enough by the mentioned four options, I won't think about them for now.