Friday, June 16, 2023

Traveller World Explainer - Phase 1 Complete!

It now handles the classic Traveller basic world explainer. And I've got a single installer now that at least works on my machine...


The installer can be found here on my OneDrive. If anyone tries it, please let me know if it actually works for you as well! What I was hoping was that the text files it uses would be available, but in checking out the installed software (in the .App hidden directory in your local user directory, then poke around) it is not available.

I have a few choices to make with this software. I may add an option to create a random world as that seems pretty popular and now that I've made the validation process an internal service, I can verify that the world is at least technically correct.

I can also add an option to use the TravellerMap API so you can search there. Last time I did this it was a two step process: first I load all the sectors the Traveller map has, then you choose the sector, then I load the systems for that sector for you to choose. If I go this route (and I know I will eventually) I'll have to add SQLite back to the software so I can locally cache that data. Meaning you need to be online for the initial loads, but after that, if I have the data stored locally, I don't need to hit up that wonderful API.

Other choices include expanding this out to use other versions: it is fairly modular the way I built it, so it should not be difficult to add Mongoose & T5 rules in there.

And finally...even though I swore I'd never get another Mongoose book again (while I liked 1e, 2e seems to be going all Judge Dread and things that just are not Traveller to me. As well as the last few books I bought from them just fell apart after reading only a couple of times) they are redoing the world book from Megatraveller DTG. As I only have the Grand Census part of that, I'll probably go ahead & get that book as I do love me some world building! If I go that route, I could add the extended world building in there.

Dang, and I could generate the animal encounter tables. Slowly start doing what Heaven&Earth did (and I still use!) But with public source code so that anyone can use it, fork it, whatever. 

Anyways - let me know where you would like this to go next, and if you install it, if it actually works!

And another finally: starting to review the .Net code at work. And sadly, currently way above me as I am a very small-scale developer. But it is pretty clean code, just heavily abstracted, but following a lot of the MS best practices. So, as I learn from that, hopefully I can apply some of that, if applicable, here.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Cannot install. I get a popup that says the publisher certificate cannot be verified.

Craig Oliver said...

Dang. the other workaround is if I share that directory with you, you can run the powershell command which does install the cert installation for you. this is a self-signed cert.

This should work (just run the install.ps1 script): https://1drv.ms/f/s!AgjJYJOsJH7WhpkONy09Y5bxYqKQ3g?e=0D53VK

I may see if I can try & publish this to the MS store, in which case they get me a certificate once it gets approved. Not sure I need to ask permission but I'll email Marc Miller to see if that's okay as it is always better to ask.

Craig Oliver said...

and you may be able to bypass that alert and accept the cert anyway.