Workshop Report July 2019
The July is a very intense month for this project so far. Two major things happened: I released a new version of Genesis after 7 months and I announced the plans for Genesis 5.
The release of Genesis 4.1 was an improvement to 4.0, but even though some people gave it a test run before it was released, a lot of new bugs have been found upon release. I prepared a new release (4.1.1.) after a week and I am still bug fixing. A noteworthy event was that I was able to convince a very thoroughly Splittermond bug reporter to join the team and fix the bugs himself. So Splittermond players expect 4.1.2 to have a lot of spell and mastership bug fixes.
But most of my current time (at the moment, I estimate 4 hours per day) go into writing the Shadowrun 6 code. The last weeks I was concentrating on the backend of the character generation, trying to rebuild the archetypes from the core rules. While doing so I constantly hit parts where we need to change or could improve the character sheet (I am keeping Anja busy) and also found aspects I did not take care of in SR5. I hope the overall quality of Genesis will be a lot better for SR6 than it was for SR5.
For now I am concentrating a bit more on the user interface - polishing and adding missing functionality.
Not touched so far is the code for SR6 character advancement. While this will most likely not take so long, it will still take some weeks of time to do it right. A question here I haven't figured out yet, is how I will implement Undo functionality. The problem there is not the Undo itself, but how this will influence the history of the character. Usually I log every advancement of a skill, attribute, new spell, etc. with a timestamp in a history. What should happen when performing an advancement several sessions ago? E.g. you once raised the skill "Firearms" from 4 to 6, played 3 adventure modules and now decide to reduce your skill to 4 again and invest the Karma elsewhere. Do I simply delete any trace of the skill once being increased or do I log that the skill is decreased again?
The near future will bring two things. A public release of Genesis 4.1.2 with more Splittermond fixes and a first test release of Genesis 5 that allows character generation (but not advancement). That release will be only available to Patreons on the Socius tier, to keep the amount of testers low for the beginning.
Stay tuned.