So, I'm probably the odd-man-out, but any chance there's a Mac version for this? One of our players used it and it looks amazing, but I don't have any working PCs in the house.

You can't run a Windows emulator on your Mac?

Unless I'm mistaken, the cheapest one is $60. I've never needed one until now, and $60 is a pretty penny for a character sheet.

Unless I'm mistaken, the cheapest one is $60. I've never needed one until now, and $60 is a pretty penny for a character sheet.

Wait, you overspend hundreds of $$$ on an Apple product, but you won't spring an extra $60 for an emulator that gives you what you could've had for less money in the first place?

Just kidding!

Honestly, though - I'm not trying to get into a religious fight here, but I seriously thought Macs came with a Windows emulator these days...

Isn't that their big selling point?

"We know you hate Microsoft but like running software, so we give you a Windows VM so you can still run software!"

I thought I remember seeing commercials about it a while back.

Also, is there something like Wine available on the Mac? After all, Mac and Linux are rather similar under the hood these days.

VMWare Player is free. Wait, I just looked it up to see if it was available for the Mac, and it looks like they've stopped making Player altogether?!?

Ok, how about Oracle's VirtualBox , that's available for Mac for free.

I honestly wish that there is something out there for you! Good luck!

Wait, you overspend hundreds of $$$ on an Apple product, but you won't spring an extra $60 for an emulator that gives you what you could've had for less money in the first place?

Total cost of ownership over the lifetime of the product is something that Macs do quite well on. Sure, you can buy a cheaper product, one that you will toss out in a year and buy another cheaper product. But total up that cost you spend over three to five years (which is the typical lifespan of most Macs), and the Mac wins.

Since Apple doesn’t make low-end crapware products, you can’t compare a $200 Chromebook to a MacBook Air. Build a comparable configuration in the Chrome or Windows environment from a vendor other than Apple, and you’ll probably spend about the same amount of money or more on the sticker price, and you’d still have something to throw away in a year or two.

Consider how much time you spend worrying about the majority of viruses and malware, and the Mac definitely wins. Sure, we have some viruses and malware on the Mac, but they are much more rare, and the majority of vulnerabilities are actually from cross-platform products like Flash or Java, not Mac-native.

There’s a reason why PC Magazine has voted a Mac as the best Windows computer for several years in a row. Apple actually puts out a quality product, for people who care about that sort of thing.

If you don’t care about quality, then you should feel free to buy whatever you want and throw it away in a few months or a year or whatever.

Honestly, though - I'm not trying to get into a religious fight here, but I seriously thought Macs came with a Windows emulator these days…

Nope. You can get good Windows emulators, sure. You can run Bootcamp so that you can dual-boot between Mac and whatever, and then buy and install a copy of Windows on your Bootcamp partition, but those are all extra-cost items, if you really do want to actually run Windows on your Mac.

Isn't that their big selling point?

"We know you hate Microsoft but like running software, so we give you a Windows VM so you can still run software!”

No, Apple gives you their own application software that is compatible with Microsoft file formats, and is even more backwards compatible than the latest products that actually come from Microsoft, but that’s Mac-native software and not something that is intended to let you run Windows VMs or whatever.

Also, is there something like Wine available on the Mac? After all, Mac and Linux are rather similar under the hood these days.

Wine might be available, but that’s always a real crapshoot no matter what product you’re trying to run. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.

VMWare Player is free. Wait, I just looked it up to see if it was available for the Mac, and it looks like they've stopped making Player altogether?!?

It might be free for PCs, but VMware Fusion is the client program on the Mac and it is not free.

It’s also very high quality software, so frankly I’m perfectly happy that it is something you pay for and actually properly supported by the company.

Ok, how about Oracle's VirtualBox , that's available for Mac for free.

I honestly wish that there is something out there for you! Good luck!

Virtualbox is free, yes. And not well-supported, IMO. I have to deal with it on a daily basis.

Even with Virtualbox, you’ll still have to buy and install a copy of Windows as a VM on the machine, and that puts you right back into the same price ballpark.

Personally, I feel that the real solution in this space is coming down the pike with Kitematic and Docker. If OggDude were able to take his .Net environment and build a standard Docker container with that, anyone running a Docker environment somewhere else should be able to run his software without any problems.

With Docker soon to be much better supported on Windows, full native support for Docker on Linux, and Kitematic+Docker on the Mac, that’s the real trifecta.

Actually, I thought by now that .NET would have cross-platform support. It is, after all, a VM itself (the CLR is akin to the Java VM) and all you would theoretically need is the .NET libraries and the CLR ported to different platforms to run any .NET software. About the only problem I see would be that some .NET components are actually wrappers around old ActiveX controls, which themselves would need to be ported. As far as the character generator goes, about the only issue it would have is that the WebBrowser control is a .NET wrapper around the ActiveX control that comes with Internet Explorer. I would probably have to find a native browser control to replace it, if it were able to be ported.

Throw away in a year? My personal hand-built Windows 7 machine hasn't even been powered down in over a year. I built it 4 years ago, and it's still going strong, I've only upgraded the video card in that time. It was an upgrade from my previous machine that lasted over 7 years. Oh, and I don't run virus scanners either - I don't get viruses. non-admin rights, UAC, and various other Win7 security measures ensure that, I have never needed anything else.

I get a new Win7 work laptop every 3 years, but it just gets handed down to the next rung. After that, the company raffles them off to employees. I've got one I won 2 years go, so that makes it 8 years old. Still works just fine.

Back in my right-after-college days, my roommate ended up ditching his Mac because he found himself using one of my extra Windows machines quite often. They were more stable. His Mac gave the cute discordant note and the pretty bomb symbol to him every few months or so, but my 3 just plugged along.

I find the anecdotal Mac=stable / Win=crash arguments to be pretty tired and outdated. My personal anecdotal eveidence contradicts it.

I don't feel that everyone has to switch to Windows. Windows isn't for everyone. Just like not everyone knows how to drive a manual transmission (I do), or knit a sweater (I don't). Everyone is different, and to each their own.

Like I said, I don't want to start a religious flame war here. Nothing I say will convince anyone to switch to Windows, and nothing anyone can say will get me to give up the only OS that does everything I need. (Sorry Linux, I tried to love you as a desktop OS! But you remain relegated to being my server OS only.)

By the way, I agree chromebooks are mostly junk; my step-daughter's father bought one for her and she hates it. Just get an android tablet at that point (love my Galaxy Note Pro 12.2). For less than $500 I got her a Win81 touchscreen laptop with bag and external optical drive for her junior year of high school. She loves it, and uses it for audio and non-linear video editing (gasp!) - she'll be taking it to college this fall. Her boyfriend is jealous. He has a Mac.

Back in my right-after-college days, my roommate ended up ditching his Mac because he found himself using one of my extra Windows machines quite often. They were more stable. His Mac gave the cute discordant note and the pretty bomb symbol to him every few months or so, but my 3 just plugged along.

Any machine that is not well-maintained will tend to have more problems than one that is. A poorly maintained Mac can be worse than a well-maintained Windows machine. And they could even be physically on the same hardware, because at that level you’re talking about OS maintenance and not the underlying physical device.

In this kind of discussion, what you have to pay more attention to is the average and the median, not the extremes. I’ve worked with Macs since the very first 128K model, and in that time it has been my experience that the average Mac is much more stable than the average Windows box, and hardware-wise the average Mac has a much longer useful lifespan than the average Windows box — largely because of the OS and the fact that Apple has been willing to try to properly support much older hardware even with the latest releases.

I find the anecdotal Mac=stable / Win=crash arguments to be pretty tired and outdated. My personal anecdotal eveidence contradicts it.

I go back to the original IBM PC and PC XT, as well as the original 128K Mac, plus the generation of machines before that like the Apple ][+, the Commodore Vic-20, and the Radio Shack TRS-80. And those are just the ones I’ve written programs for — in terms of using programs that others have developed, I go back even further.

I’ve been a professional system administrator since 1989 — over 25 years ago — and that career started in the basement of the Pentagon, with a Top Secret/SCI clearance.

I’ve outlined my personal and professional experience in this space.

I don't feel that everyone has to switch to Windows. Windows isn't for everyone. Just like not everyone knows how to drive a manual transmission (I do), or knit a sweater (I don't). Everyone is different, and to each their own.

And from my perspective, Apple has always understood the consumer pretty well as well as small workgroups, but they have never understood the larger Enterprise. You can use Apple products in the typical Enterprise, but that typically takes a level of effort that most people are not willing or able to sustain.

By the way, I agree chromebooks are mostly junk; my step-daughter's father bought one for her and she hates it. Just get an android tablet at that point (love my Galaxy Note Pro 12.2).

I bought an Android tablet to see if they were any good. For about a week, I played with my Galaxy Note Tab 4, and I don’t think I’ve turned it on since. There were a few things I liked, but the vast majority of things I didn’t like, and I’m not willing to commit the effort it would take to get a Cyanogen mod installed and properly maintained on a device that is not primary for me.

That’s the kind of thing I might be paid to do at work, but I’m not willing to put that kind of effort into something that is supposed to be used at home.

For less than $500 I got her a Win81 touchscreen laptop with bag and external optical drive for her junior year of high school. She loves it, and uses it for audio and non-linear video editing (gasp!) - she'll be taking it to college this fall. Her boyfriend is jealous. He has a Mac.

Touchscreens work well on tablet type devices where the hardware and software has been designed from the ground up to use touchscreens, but they don’t work well on laptop-type devices. If you have a laptop that can convert to a tablet form factor, then any software you run that has been properly designed to work on that converted tablet should be fine.

But this industry has done the convertible laptop/tablet thing before, and where it has always fallen down has been on the other 99.99999999% of software that is out there that isn’t designed to properly work on a tablet, and where compromises have to be made to the laptop side of functionality in order to get tablet functionality and likewise compromises have been made on the tablet functionality in order to get laptop functionality.

So, I’ll wait and see. If Microsoft is still selling these things and making a huge profit on them in three to five years, then maybe there will be something there.

My fist computer was an Apple ][e. I wrote code in Apple basic, integer basic and raw machine code. I also bought a Z80 card for Pascal. I've moved jumpers to set IRQs on I/O cards. I've made network cables for Token Ring, coaxial, and RJ-45. I've installed and maintained Netware 3.11 for several small businesses. I code in C/C++/Java/Javascript, I use write SQL queries, deal with WAR and EAR files in an enterprize environment, I use Virtual Machines all day, I....

Oh wait. Time to put our e-peens away...

So, OggDude, sorry about the mess!

How's that software going?

Did I mention how helpful it is? Love it.

Very nice tool.

The only two complains I have are:

- You cannot create pdfs

- You cannot chose a force sensitive character

Otherwise great job

You can create a PDF of character sheet by printing it and having PDF Maker or other PDF printing software installed.

No native support though.

You can create force characters by choosing a Force based career or specialization that gives you a force point.

When you do so a new panel shows up on the bottom for Force powers.

You can create force characters by choosing a Force based career or specialization that gives you a force point.

When you do so a new panel shows up on the bottom for Force powers.

Yeah, but it has to be connected to the career. Not possible to make a force sensitive smuggler e.g.

You can, although this is not a problem with the character builder.

To create a Force Sensitive Smuggler you could start with Smuggler and then take Force Sensitive Exile or Force Sensitive Emergent universal specializations.

Or you could basically take one of the F&D classes to approximate your Force Sensitive Smuggler.

Unless I'm mistaken, the cheapest one is $60. I've never needed one until now, and $60 is a pretty penny for a character sheet.

Are you saying that the emulator would only be good for the character generator? cause once you have the emulator you can run ANY windows program. And that is useful.

You can, although this is not a problem with the character builder.

To create a Force Sensitive Smuggler you could start with Smuggler and then take Force Sensitive Exile or Force Sensitive Emergent universal specializations.

Or you could basically take one of the F&D classes to approximate your Force Sensitive Smuggler.

EDIT

I just realized you probably mean create a Force and Destiny character from the start and pick a fitting specialization then roleplay him as a smuggler (or whatever you are you going for). This would work too.

Hiya, so how do you get the next Rank in Duty once your group gets to 100??

Hiya, so how do you get the next Rank in Duty once your group gets to 100??

that would be handled by the group sheet in the GM tools.

Lots of activity

I, too, started out with an Apple ][+, went on to write software for the Apple IIGS, then finally gave up on Apple when they gave up on me. I loved my IIGS, I just wish they would have supported it.

As someone said, just get a PDF printer driver if you want to create PDFs for your sheets. To get Force powers, you need a Force rating. To get a Force rating, you need to either start out with a FaD career, or buy either Force-sensitive Emergent or Exile.

To "use" your Duty, create a group in the GM Tools and add all the characters to it that belong to the group. On the first tab (Description), it'll have a place to manually change your Contribution Rank, or when total group Duty is over 100, you can hit "Advance". This will up your Contribution rank, and set everyone's Duty back to 0.

Did I hit all the main topics?

Cool Cool...

Feature question...

Do you think it would be possible that on the page that has the Talents (And instead of the Descriptions of pg #s on the side) that can be a separate section for multiple trees...

For example I am a Pilot/Gunslinger...On 1 side have the Pilot Talents (In alphabetically order) then have a divider then Gunslinger Talents

That way people can see what they got from which trees w/o fumbling. And they can keep track of where they are going or what they want to add in whichever tree. This is only for people who do not add the actually Trees in the PDF.

I'm having trouble with "unarmed" showing up on the character sheet. I'm sure my players will rarely ever use it, but I like having it on there as a reminder. I currently manage and print all the sheets for my group. I select "show" from the weapons list under equipment, indicating I want it to show the stat line on the first page of the character sheet, however when I select print it does not show up.

While in the Force Powers section of the Character Generator, if the checkbox for Use Mentor Discount is checked, and the dropdown selection is changed, the checkbox becomes unchecked.

Otherwise, this is a great program. Really helpful, and very useful for newbies like myself. Thanks!!!

While in the Force Powers section of the Character Generator, if the checkbox for Use Mentor Discount is checked, and the dropdown selection is changed, the checkbox becomes unchecked.

Otherwise, this is a great program. Really helpful, and very useful for newbies like myself. Thanks!!!

That's likley intentional. The generator calculates your spent XP every time (rather than recording a history). So it's entirely possible that a character purchased a Force Power before getting a mentor (in fact, by RAW you do not get the discount at character creation). So the generator will need to know which power got the discount and which one did not. That is why some powers are checked and some are not.

Ah ok, got it! Thank you.

Also you might lose your mentor later in play and so no longer get the discount.

Cool Cool...

Feature question...

Do you think it would be possible that on the page that has the Talents (And instead of the Descriptions of pg #s on the side) that can be a separate section for multiple trees...

For example I am a Pilot/Gunslinger...On 1 side have the Pilot Talents (In alphabetically order) then have a divider then Gunslinger Talents

That way people can see what they got from which trees w/o fumbling. And they can keep track of where they are going or what they want to add in whichever tree. This is only for people who do not add the actually Trees in the PDF.

First off, you don't want just the page numbers, just go through your talents and add descriptions for them.

Second, the point of that section is to list ALL of your talents, regardless of where they come from, so you can have a complete overview. If you want to see which talents go with which specializations, then include the spec trees with your character sheet and refer to the trees.