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Originally Posted by markelphoenix

As a customer, it appears as if the 'plot has been lost' with focus being on trying to simulate virtual tabletops, when the market is already inundated with virtual tabletop offerings. What the market is not inundated with is character generators for these games.

We are in NO WAY working on another VTT. I agree that there are lots of VTTs out there. The current talk centering on VTTs with HLO is in regards to enabling data to be fed out of HLO and into the existing VTTs.

The work on Campaign Theater is in no way seeking to replace VTTs. The current VTTs do not get down into all the gritty details of character creation, so they gloss over lots of that. This extends to all the nuances of items and abilities that are used during play. However, that's all critical information when running a game. Campaign Theater seeks to give GMs control over all of those aspects, and share that information across the gaming group, with a suitable level of detail for the game system. All of the visual aspects of maps and the like are ignored, as those are the areas where the VTTs focus their efforts. CT focuses on the data that the VTTs largely gloss over.

See below for more details on this...

Originally Posted by markelphoenix

If team is currently inundated with source material, shouldn't that take a higher priority over additional tabletop functionality?

As a customer for a character generation tool, my expectation is of rapid offering of released source material that adds options to character creation. Perhaps I have rose colored glasses of the Hero Lab Classic days and am just remembering prompt and verbose delivery on content releases.

My expectation would be content first. Provide the same value that you made your name on, which was pretty awesome character generators that stayed up to date with material release.

Allow me to dispel this misconception straightaway. We have more more data file developers on staff than all other developers COMBINED. So, yes, our focus is absolutely on CONTENT FIRST.

Beyond that, there also seems to be an incorrect assumption that our staff is all interchangeable pieces. Our staff includes both software developers (including myself) and data file developers. They are in no way interchangeable. Think of a football team. Does it make sense to have a quarterback playing middle linebacker? Or an offensive tackle playing quarterback? In case you're not a football fan, it doesn't.

We have people who are experts in browser-based client applications written in JavaScript, C# on the server, C++ for the Hero Lab engine, databases, IT, and a myriad other areas. We also have staff who are experts in writing Hero Lab data files, which uses its own completely unique language that is tailored for modeling RPG mechanics. There are many here on the forums who will affirm that expertise in any one of those is hard won, and an expert in one area will frequently not even be functionally literate in another. So we all work together, each serving our position on the team.

For reference, a big book like the APG requires roughly 600 hours of work in the data files alone to complete. That does NOT include time to augment the engine to support new capabilities that are needed, nor time to add/improve behaviors within the UI for the book, nor server support for those pieces. Add all that together and the total approaches 1000 hours.

That's more than SIX MONTHS of work for ONE BOOK, and it necessitates expertise across a broad range of technical arenas. Now multiply that the by the number of books, and there's a ton of work to be done.

Originally Posted by markelphoenix

Part that's confusing for me, is if they focused on the first priority, the VTT's could consume a JSON of a character, then when session was done, the VTT could export back out JSON for HLO to consume to update any character growth or new items.

Maybe you've missed it, but we've been spending a significant amount of time working to achieve the first half of that. The data needs to be in a format that can be readily consumed by a VTT (or other tool). It also needs to be done in a manner that remains valid despite years of continual release of new books that revise and expand the rules. And since we need to support multiple, ever-evolving game systems, it must be done in a manner that is entirely data-driven. That's no cakewalk.

The second half is not likely to ever happen. The reason for that is that many of the details the HL requires are simply not maintained by the VTTs. Even if we export them, the VTT throws them away. Since those details don't exist within the VTT, they can't be exported and fed back into HL. This is something we pursued with a couple VTTs years ago, it proved to be a major gotcha.

The reality of that second half of the problem is the motivation behind Campaign Theater. We have all the data, including all the gory details that the VTT doesn't track. So we focus on the material that the VTTs gloss over and present it to the gaming group in a clean manner. We allow it to be controlled by the GM and shared appropriately through the CT interface. Shortly, we'll be exporting all that data so the VTT can retain what it wants and ignore the rest. The net result will be two tools working in unison with one another, each focusing on its own areas of expertise.