An Update from Rob

[kbs666]

Originally Posted by BJ

8. Have you considered opening the code to the community?

We have discussed it at length but won’t be doing so at this time. Our original vision included evolving Realm Works and Hero Lab both to a point where we could more fully integrate them and blur the lines between the two products. While we don’t currently have the resources to do this, we still absolutely plan to bring some of the key capabilities from Realm Works into Hero Lab. Additionally, the commercial framework used in the Realm Works UI costs thousands of dollars and anyone wanting to work on Realm Works would need to purchase that framework to begin working with the product, making it unlikely that much good would come from it.

If the HLC team isn't even paying attention to things that break a heavily used feature of RW I have my doubts about the integration of the tools. I also predict that people will be uninterested in paying for a combined campaign manager/character manager. This especially applies if that means HLO.

As to the 3rd party libraries used in RW, the first thing an open source project would do is strip out all of that stuff and replace it with open source equivalents. Qt, or equivalent, for the UI elements. I'm sure some research will turn up a diagramming package.

I understand that this is Rob's dream app but if it isn't working as a business let the community turn it into something that fulfills both the goals that were initially set for it and to add the features that would make it so much better for the dedicated users.