Suggestiong for Tactical Console

[ruhar]

Hero Lab calculates a lot of things that makes our gaming a lot easier. But I don't understand why it won't make GMs gaming easier. The Tactical Console is great for remembering the order of initiative, who's actually in the battle and who's not, damage and healing, circumstances and combat actions and conditions. It even knows what round the battle is in. But it drops the ball on the duration of conditions. With all that Hero Lab does it won't turn off a condition when it expires or at the very least alert me that a condition has expired. With everything a GM has to maintain being able to have conditions automated like everything else in the program would be so helpful to a busy GM.

Another condition that would be helpful to include and also be automated is bleed. I actually had a player accuse me of being too lazy to activate bleed condition during combat. I nearly leaped across the table to choke him as I explained to him that it's not a feature of the program. But I'm also fine with telling him every time he causes that condition it's up to him to remind me on his round. However, having the other conditions automated would be a huge help.

Thanks.
Ruhar

 

[Aaron]

It's a good suggestion, and one we've heard before. As always, the trouble is time. Starfinder is coming next year, perhaps we'll be able to improve on the tactical console for that, though I can't be sure.

 

[ShadowChemosh]

Another condition that would be helpful to include and also be automated is bleed.

Bleed and many other helpful combat conditions are included in the Community Pack. So your player was actually right if he is running the community Pack it has a "Bleed" condition to activate.

After installing turn on "ShadowChemosh Adjustments" and you will also get: Catch on Fire, Bleeding, Climbing, Swimming/Underwater, & Deal Nonlethal Dmg (-4H).

 

[Azhrei]

Yes, but does your Bleed condition automatically apply damage every round? Does Fast Healing automatically heal damage each round? And so on. If it does, I think my Gm would be more motivated to install and use the Community Pack. As it stands, he gets a bunch of warnings when he loads my character's portfolio because I have it installed (and use it) and he doesn't.

 

[ShadowChemosh]

Yes, but does your Bleed condition automatically apply damage every round? Does Fast Healing automatically heal damage each round? And so on.

As far as I know this can't be done. Not only cause I don't think you can get to the "round" information but also because you can't really apply "damage" or "healing" to a character via a script. I could adjust total HP up or down but the logic that controls damage/healing is a 'special' thing in HL.

If it does, I think my Gm would be more motivated to install and use the Community Pack. As it stands, he gets a bunch of warnings when he loads my character's portfolio because I have it installed (and use it) and he doesn't.

If he installed it he would not have those warnings when loading your character. So he "should" install it just for that feature.

 

[Silveras]

Well, I had planned to eventually post this as a new thread, but since this one is here, I will just post my prepared text for discussion:

Tactical Console Improvements

In the spirit of my prior "Spellbook Functionality" thread, I am opening this one to try to get some community feedback on various features that might help the Tactical Console. This includes brainstorming alternatives (such as the "The Party" Hero type mentioned below) that might make it easier to do some things. Part of the discussion should also be to try to rate how important various features would be to the community, in order to give LoneWolf some input there in a coordinated fashion.


Alterations (probably all at the core HeroLab level, not something a single Game System can implement)

• Expand role choices from "Ally" or "Enemy" to support multiple Ally Groups, Enemy Groups, and Neutral Groups. Or at least to add "Neutral" as a third option in the existing list.
  
• Use of horizontal space: When maximized, the Tactical Console window assumes the height of the available display.. but does not expand its width, which is fixed.
  
• Change creature picture display: Because allies are shown on the left and allies on the right, this may be preventing better use of the space. Changing this to a colored border (green for allies, red for enemies? or Black for enemies, Gray for neutrals, and White for allies to assist those with color-blindness?) and putting all of the images on one side may free up some space for use.

New Base Functions

• Add "Party" as a new Hero type: As an alternative to adding functionality to the Tactical Console itself, some might be implemented as features of a new Hero type: The Party. HeroLab can currently move gear from character to character, so visibility between Heroes is already established. This type of "Hero" could be used to hold "group property" of various sorts, and maybe to implement the "Group Operations" mentioned below.
  
• Add CMB to attacks and CMD to defenses: This will probably require expanding the height of each participant's row.
  
• Add Spells to pop-up modification window: the modification window allows access to most things that need to be updated during combat.. hit points, adjustments, conditions.. but not spells as they are used.
  
• Apply damage and conditions to multiple entries: Applying updates to multiple entries would be beneficial. Challenge: The specific damage values can be highly variable per-creature due to different resistances or immunities on each recipient, class features, saving throws, and GM adjustments.
  
• Group Operations: Such as roll a skill check for all Allies or all Enemies. Challenge: Not all GMs will want this. Challenge: Situational modifiers will not be included. Including Situational Modifiers would push this to "Advanced" or "Extremely Advanced" functions.
  
• Improved Readied Action handling: When a creature readies an action, their initiative does not change unless that Readied Action is triggered. If the creature's turn in the initiative order comes up again without the action being triggered, the creature can act normally or keep readied. The current Tactical Console doesn't allow "un-readying" to put the creature back into the normal order. Related Issue: The current implementation pretty much parks the creature with a readied action to the side and does not "stop" on them as initiative plays through; they are counted as having acted in order for the "Next Round" button to validate that it is ok to move on, but they are not counted as having acted in order for their initiative positions to change. If some variety of automated duration tracking for spells and effects were implemented, this would need to be adjusted to ensure that the rounds spent "Readied" are included.
  
• Improved Flat-Footed / Surprise handling: Mentioned previously, the current Tactical Console forces the Flat-Footed condition on all participants until they receive a "Has Acted" indication. This does not support the case in which some participants get to act for a partial (Surprise) round before others.
  
• Remove the "Next Round" Button: Pathfinder uses cyclical initiative; there is no purpose to the "Next Round" button as all effects are keyed to the "next turn" or either the one who caused it or the creature suffering it. Challenge: GMs using initiative variants will not benefit from this, and may lose functionality, unless it can be made optional. Challenge: GMs used to moving creatures up and down in the initiative order may cause some to be seen as active too often, and apply automated "duration tracking" more than is proper.
  
• Track per-round limted use abilities and re-set at the start of the creature's next turn: In keeping with the "Remove the 'Next Round' Button" change, track and re-set "X-per-Round" ability counts (Attacks of Opportunity, Swift/Immediate Actions, etc.) Challenge: Immediate Actions consume your NEXT round's Swift Action, so may need to be tracked separately from Swift Actions.

New Advanced Functions

• Make some display elements options: Whether to show the image or not, and perhaps choices among "thick" or "thin" displays for the participants ... "thick" could allow additional lines of information, while "thin" could allow for more compressed lines to show more participants in the available area (focus on the Initiative order over combat details).
  
• Track durations and expire effects: Particularly for spells and conditions. Challenge: Spells cast before the battle begins cannot accurately be tracked. Challenge: Variable durations (eg. "1d4 rounds") may be difficult to implement.
  
• Track re-use intervals: Such as Breath Weapons or other abilities that can be used "every 1dX rounds".
  
• Apply ongoing effects round-by-round: Things like ongoing damage from acid arrow spells, Fast Healing or Regeneration special qualities, or the like.

New Extremely Advanced Functions

• Damage Typing: Some abilities apply only to specific damage types, and some damage types behave differently with different types of creatures. For example, Positive Energy can be used to heal living creatures or harm undead, while Negative Energy can be used to harm the living or heal undead. The possible varieties make automating this beyond the limits of Advanced Functions.
  

Conditions
These new conditions are not all called out in the Glossary in the Core Rulebook, but keeping track of these (especially if a session ends mid-combat) can be useful. Some of these have been added to the Community Pack since I began this listing, but supporting them in the core would be good.

• Afire: Some things, like Alchemist's Fire and some fire-based spells, can cause a creature to catch on fire and suffer additional damage for one or more rounds. A version exisxts in the Community Pack
  
• Carrying Light: Because sometimes it is important to know who has the lights.
  
• Dead: I have raised this before, and it was not seen as necessary to distinguish in HeroLab between "Dying" and "Dead"... that was better left to the GM. However, if the Tactical Console is to have features that automatically apply benefits like fast healing or regeneration, it must also track when a creature that has not become Stable becomes Dead so that those effects stop appropriately.
  
• Diseased: Who is incubating a disease and needs to make recurring saving throws?
  
• Sleeping: While not a condition listed in the Glossary of the Core Rulebook, it would be nice to have. It is primarily informational, allowing the GM to track which characters have awoken during a night attack, but it also applies when sleep effects are used. Such a condition is easy enough to add in the Editor, but it would be nice to have in the core package.
  
• Surprised: To support the "Improved Flat-Footed / Surprise handling" feature, the use of a new condition for "Surprised" might make the changes easier. "Surprised" would apply "Flat-Footed", but can be removed by the GM to represent one group surprising the other (ambush) and other situations.

 

[Azhrei]

If he installed it he would not have those warnings when loading your character. So he "should" install it just for that feature.

Heh... Preaching to the choir, sir!

As to proposed TC upgrades, I'll post on that separately. I've already written a couple posts on this topic, as well as submitting a bug report that describes both necessary and nice-to-have features for the TC.

 

[Lord Magus]

At least, if the various DRs, ERs, fast healing, bleed effects etc.. currently applying to a character were listed under HPs on the In-Play tab, that would help not forgetting some of those. My Storm Druid has had ER Lightning forever, and I tend to forget that...

 

[Azhrei]

Well, it's going to be some time before I can post a wish list for the TC. I will add some overall observations here now and do something more complete towards the end of the week.

First and foremost, can a scripting language be used for the TC? This would likely be a major risk ("risk" as defined in software development simply means it involves a potentially large investment in resources that may not pay off). There could be some huge payoffs for this: ability to customize the TC logic for each game system (the initiative used by PF is not the same as used by Savage Worlds, for example), the ability to add themes to the TC (most scripting languages provide a GUI layer that allows CSS, or something like CSS, to control component layout, colors, fonts, and so on), and the ability to include event handling for user-defined features (imagine a TC that fires a "turn completed" event that can invoke user-written code; now expand that to "round completed", "spell cast", and "damage taken", and allow for user-defined events).

I believe HL is written mostly in C (and Obj-C on the Mac platform?), and both have been successfully extended with scripting languages. Examples that immediately come to mind are Perl, Python, and Lua, but I'm sure there are many more. JavaScript and Go would be good choices, as they are very well-known languages with a lot of easy-to-find resources such as tutorials.

Ideally, HL would be able to spin off a new thread to handle the TC, leaving the main window available to continue to manipulate individual heroes, but if HL is not already multithreaded this will be a huge amount of work.

There's no doubt that it would be a significant investment. But the payoff would be similarly large! Users could write their own TC for their game system, similar to the Community Pack by SC. But this would go beyond myriad small tweaks to heroes and step into the realm of implementing actual game mechanics. And a scripting language would be immediately cross-platform if the language implementation is cross-platform (as the languages listed above are).

Otherwise, users have to rely on LW to produce updates and those updates tend to get bogged down in a development pipeline with no transparency to users. In addition, LW gets free script development, since a share-alike license (see CreativeCommons.org) means LW could leverage what users produce and add it to the next release of HL...

More later.

 

[Merion]

To all of the suggestions: Yes please!

I only use HL as a GM and while it does its job, there's definitely room for improvement and anything to make my life as GM easier is welcome. Right now, I only use very few of the options, as it takes more time and distracts me to manage everything in the tactical console than just using pen and paper to track hp and conditions.

 

[Ualaa]

For 3.x, I used DM Genie.

For Pathfinder, I was initially using HL to build characters and Combat Manager to run combats.

The Tactical Console allows for stacking conditions correctly, and I can use HL imports of monsters or characters, which is awesome.
Combat Manager allows applying damage to multiple targets at once, which is the main feature I'm really missing from the Tactical Console; a fireball goes off and three targets save while six fail... that is nine hit point adjustments with the TC but one (or two, if both enemies and allies are within the blast) for Combat Manager.

Allowing for bleed and fast heal to be applied directly would be very nice too.

Also having buff/debuff durations... being able to set a condition/spell and have it last for six rounds, applying it's effect for that duration, and then turning itself off after that time... that would be amazing too.

Awesome tool so far, with room to get even better.

 

[Valdacil]

I'll throw my 2 cp in here. The biggest thing I would love to see out of the Tactical Console is ability to track limited duration spells and abilities. I'm not so concerned about the issue of variable duration spells (like 1d4) because we don't use TC for rolls (even init) anyway... everyone wants to roll their dice. So if I wanted to add a marker for spell expiration, I would want to put in how many rounds anyway as the player would roll the die and I'd enter the value. I suppose it would be nice is static duration spells/ability effects automatically put in the values, but I would want the ability to override that (like I do with Init today).

 

[DeltaMasterMind]

I +1 this!

 

[Azhrei]

I'm wondering what the Tactical Console will be like in Hero Lab Online. Will it even have a TC?

It could be a popup window in the web browser that overlays the main page, but more likely it would be a separate browser window so that it could be placed outside the boundaries of the main page.

How will it communicate with the HLO server? Will it be given raw information from the server (in JSON or XML?) and then be responsible for displaying it by itself? Or will the server pre-render HTML and send the result to the TC window for display?

If the former, then a little bit of monkey patching will be able to modify the way the window is displayed and how it functions if the TC is sufficiently modular. For example, I use GreaseMonkey with Firefox all the time to modify the page content on the fly. This lets me change how the HTML is displayed or how the JavaScript runs or how the CSS is used. I can add buttons, text fields, dropdown lists, and images to someone else's web page and I can then add my own functionality to those elements. I can place them within the <div>s that the original page already had, or I can create new div's and insert them where I want on the page.

I'm not likely to sign up for HLO (I don't like the idea of perpetual payments -- and yes, I know the whole world is going that route, but it doesn't mean I have to like it ). However, if the TC were sufficiently robust and, in places where it isn't, it were modular enough that I could add my own functionality, then it would be worth a look...

(Another thread discussing the TC is here, but this thread seemed more technical and included a "wish list" of features on the first page.)

 

[Ualaa]

I'm using d20Pro for this functionality now.

 

[ShadowChemosh]

What I would love is the ability to add CUSTOM TC's to HLO. Currently HLC can only handle a single TC configuration. HLO would be a great place to add the ability to have custom coded (using standard HL scripts) TCs that then the community could make. This means the community Pack could also have a Shadow TC version that does things differently.

That would be what I want.

 

[Azhrei]

[...] HLO would be a great place to add the ability to have custom coded (using standard HL scripts) TCs that then the community could make.

The scripts are the issue. I’m guessing that they execute on the server, not on the client. Which means the *result* of the script has to be sent to the client for display purposes, but that the client can’t influence the scripts at all.

For me, that means the HTML is simply displaying results and providing a UI (for buttons and checkboxes, for example) and not doing any calculations. That limits what the client side can achieve. (If you need a data field not provided by the server, you’re SOL — sorta outta luck.)

On the flip side, trying to run the HL scripts on the client would be almost impossible. It would require a lot of data to be kept on the client, too much data to be practical, me’thinks. (And there aren’t any good alternatives for long term storage of data in the client. If there were, maybe resources could be downloaded on-demand as needed and cached; lots of data still, but not everything.) Given advances in JavaScript JIT compilers, running code on the client and getting reasonable performance is doable.

But I really want to see the TC upgraded, so I’ll likely be keeping an eye on this aspect of HLO.

 

[ShadowChemosh]

The scripts are the issue. I’m guessing that they execute on the server, not on the client. Which means the *result* of the script has to be sent to the client for display purposes, but that the client can’t influence the scripts at all.

For me, that means the HTML is simply displaying results and providing a UI (for buttons and checkboxes, for example) and not doing any calculations. That limits what the client side can achieve. (If you need a data field not provided by the server, you’re SOL — sorta outta luck.)

This is how ALL of HL works both HLC and HLO. In the case of HLO the UI is html based. In HLC its Windows based. The concept is exactly the same. Every time you "change" something on the character HLO will 100% have to talk to the server to run the HL scripts. It literally can not work any other way.

I can already add NEW UI components to HLC except for the TC because it can only handle one TC. My suggestion is that LW increase the ability to support multiple TC's (ie when you start TC you get a check box to select which TC to start). Then I could easily create a new TC by the community which has a Totally Different UI. This would give a alternative choice for gamers.

I already have community created characters sheets. NOT the HTML versions I am talking about the exact same logic that LW uses. If you have a Path of War character and go to Print Character you have "TWO" new dossiers to choose from to print maneuvers. Allot of the logic in the character sheets is the same as the HL UI logic.



I am giving a suggestion that "maybe" easy for LW to provide by allowing the ability of having multiple TC's to be supported by HL. Just like how HL can already support multiple character sheets.

 

[Conandy]

Bumping this thread to indicate my whole hearted support for most of the ideas presented here to upgrade and improve the tactical console. Although some of Silveras' suggestions go against how I currently use the console (I use the 'next round' button quite a bit, for instance), I agree with most of the needs presented here.

And I love the idea of allowing support for 3rd party/user versions of the Tactical Console! Take some of the burden off of LWD and let those enthusiastic and talented end users contribute some upgrades and options to the community!