Workshop Report 2020.7
After having released support for the last Shadowrun 6 supplement "Firing Squad", it has become a bit quieter lately - I like that. It gives me the opportunity to focus on problems and tasks that I always wanted to do, but did not find the time to do it.
There are 3 major areas of work, that I like working on:
Improve Shadowrun 6 support
Reimplement the Splittermond generator
Allow Genesis to run on Android/iOS
Every work item alone is big enough to keep me busy for several months, I usually concentrate on the Shadowrun 6 part, since there is still a lot to improve. But sometimes I am fed up with doing Shadowrun and than I work on the other tasks.
Shadowrun 6
I started on what will be the next larger update for Shadowrun, named version 1.3. It focuses on improvements how to deal with gear. We have re-categorized all weapons. Some weapon types, like close combat weapons or rifles do have multiple subtypes (e.g. blades or sniper rifles). Currently Genesis uses a type WEAPON and a subtype CLOSE_COMBAT or RIFLE. We changed that after some team discussion into 4 weapon types and more subtypes. Of course we had to change all entered data for that.
I decided to overhaul the dialog you use when you add accessories and modifications to your gear - see this post's image. (Ignore the german/english mixup for now). There have been requests to rename your gear or add notes to it, which already have been worked on.
A just recently released gear supplement "Krime Katalog" is being worked on.
You can find a list of all work items here: https://rpgframework.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SR6HELP/pages/853442561/Shadowrun+6+-+1.3.x
Splittermond
I am more than halfway finished with the new generation assistant and the new logic behind. My plan is to support optional profiles (e.g. "Swift fighter" or "Healer") that help you find suitable skills, spells, masteries and so on and could be used to auto-generate a character. That is working to some extent, my I am not satisfied yet.
Mobile App
I mentioned this every now and than. Early 2020 significant improvements have been made in projects that allow porting a Java desktop app to mobile. It works by compiling the very dynamic Java application into a static image for mobile systems. It takes a lot of time to build such an app, but the reward would be native packages for mobile plattforms. That would be great, since we would only need minor changes to allow Genesis to run on tablets and could build for Android Tablet and IPads from the same code. Unfortunately the build chain for this is really complex. I managed to get a "Hello World" app running on Desktop and Android, but I wasn't able to repeat this success yet.
The Discord Bot
Last month I asked the patrons to voice their opinion on Discord bots. The result (okay, only 7 of you voted - that wasn't much) was
43% want more features for the SR6 Discord Bot
57% are not interested in Discord Bots
0% are interested in other Discord Bots other than Shadowrun 6
I take it as a "Don't invest time in more bots, but improve the SR6 one every now and than".
By the way: I needed to let Discord verify my identity, since I am nearing 100 Discord servers using the SR6 bot.
What is next?
I expect the Shadowrun 6 version 1.3 to be released in 3-4 weeks - at least for Staging. Eventually July is also the month where the new magic book for SR6 will be available (perhaps for GenCon). If I get my hands on this, we will start working on it.
So, thanks for supporting us - it is the fuel that keeps us going.