Another Character Generator

By OggDude, in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG

First off congrats on the downloads thats awesome. Second, i have a character I went to update, she's a Force Sensitive Emergent. It says I have spent all my xp, but all the selections I made in the Force powers tree are now deslected.

Send me a copy of the character, including your DataCustom directory if it uses new items that you've added yourself. I'll see if I can get it to replicate.

Character and data file have been sent.

I found the problem. The force power dropdown was keying off of the force power's name. This worked fine until I fixed a spelling error with the Foresee power. Now older characters will crash if Foresee is chosen.

Other than that, I'm seeing the basic power selected for both Enhance and Sense. Scanning through your character, that's all I'm seeing as selected, so it seems to be working now.

This bug will be fixed in the next version.

Right but I had chosen most of the Force powers in the Enhance tree. Says I have used all 180xp, which I did but it's not showing the powers I selected.

First off congrats on the downloads thats awesome. Second, i have a character I went to update, she's a Force Sensitive Emergent. It says I have spent all my xp, but all the selections I made in the Force powers tree are now deslected.

Send me a copy of the character, including your DataCustom directory if it uses new items that you've added yourself. I'll see if I can get it to replicate.

Character and data file have been sent.

I found the problem. The force power dropdown was keying off of the force power's name. This worked fine until I fixed a spelling error with the Foresee power. Now older characters will crash if Foresee is chosen.

Other than that, I'm seeing the basic power selected for both Enhance and Sense. Scanning through your character, that's all I'm seeing as selected, so it seems to be working now.

This bug will be fixed in the next version.

Right but I had chosen most of the Force powers in the Enhance tree. Says I have used all 180xp, which I did but it's not showing the powers I selected.

The character you sent me only has Enhance basic power selected in that tree. It has Sense Basic, five talents selected in Force Sensitive Emergent and none in Scout. You have 160 total XP, 50 earned, and all of it is being used. If I deselect a 5 point talent, it drops to 155 used. If I deselect Enhance Basic, it drops to 150. Everything seems to be calculating correctly, except I don't see you has having 180 XP, just 160 XP.

I know the issue, I forgot to add the additional 30xp from the previous adventure, so that's my fault, wasn't paying attention. Sorry

Is the Tracker Utility Vest supposed to be wearable with other armor? Currently I am unable to equip it with other forms of armor. My interpretation of its utility is more as an accessory than an article meant for protection, hence wearing it with other armor when practical (with Heavy Clothing, Armored Clothing, and maybe Mountaineer armor).

Star Wars Elmur Fudd ought to be able to have some pockets for hunting Spwace Wabbits.

It's basically the same sort of question as "Can you wear a personal deflector shield with other armor?" Honestly, I don't have a definitive answer. But, I made it so that you can only equip one type of armor because stacking armor could be abused, plus the armor is generally described in terms of it being full "suits" of armor, a la D&D. Even the personal deflector shield is described as bulky and difficult to use, rather than being some compact shield generator that snaps onto your belt, or something similar.

My guess is that it's situational and just up to your GM to adjudicate. As you mentioned, it might make sense if you had heavy clothing, but not if you had battle armor. Unfortunately, the app can't take the place of a GM, so if it turns out wearing more than one type of armor is actually acceptable in certain instances, I may need to change things so that you can wear two types of armor instead of one.

At least Elmer can carry two bwaster :)

It's not a problem, I think that I just need to import one set of adversaries at a time, and keep moving the new adversary folder to the next import directory and then do the next lot of imports to build on what is already there. Once I have all the adversaries imported I can then over write the main adversary folder. I will only need to do this once and make a backup for future use.

That may or may not work :) I'm going to fix this problem for the next release.

It worked, I now have all the adversaries available in the program.. :)

I have been working on adding the few adversaries from the adventures in the EotE Beta and beginner game, this is all done now, and an interesting issue came up. I have added a few droids and NPCs of different species but there isn't an option to add species details to an adversary. This would be a really useful feature to have in a future release.

Also, is it possible to sort gear alphabetically or add a search function so I can find specific items that I need?

I have been working on adding the few adversaries from the adventures in the EotE Beta and beginner game, this is all done now, and an interesting issue came up. I have added a few droids and NPCs of different species but there isn't an option to add species details to an adversary. This would be a really useful feature to have in a future release.

Also, is it possible to sort gear alphabetically or add a search function so I can find specific items that I need?

Species exist for PC's because the species provides certain base-line character attributes, such as starting characteristics, wound and strain, starting skills and talents, or special abilities. Those don't apply for adversaries. Adversaries are just open templates you can do whatever you want with. Adversaries can be defined as anything, whether human, twi'lek, rancor, nerf, or a big ball of goo. Having a species designator, outside of just naming an adversary a "Duros Space Jockey" or whatever, wouldn't add anything to the design. That's why there's no explicit "species" for adversaries.

You can sort equipment by any column just by clicking the column header.

The species option was mainly for specific special abilities, such as Amphibious or Droid, as it would be useful to have these included on the NPC sheet?

The species option was mainly for specific special abilities, such as Amphibious or Droid, as it would be useful to have these included on the NPC sheet?

Possibly, but adversaries don't always follow the same rules as PC's. A Trandoshan PC will get the claw benefit for all Brawl skills, for instance, but for a Trandoshan adversary, it'll probably just translate into a custom "claw" weapon and that'll be it. Or, some special ability that PC's get for a particular species may not even appear in an adversary of the same "species", or may be different. It's apples and oranges, really.

However... what might be nice (and this has been suggested) is to be able to reuse special abilities or custom items so you don't have to keep typing them in all the time. The "Droid" special ability is a prime example of this. It's pretty much the same for all droid adversaries. It might be nice to just select it from a list.

Here's a little goody for you all while you wait for the next release :) It's a ZIP archive containing the adversaries and stock characters that came with the "Under a Black Sun" adventure. The characters didn't translate 100% into the CRB rules, but they're close enough and can be modified to your heart's content. Just import the ones you want into the apps and away you go. I didn't bother creating encounters, since those will be different depending on how the adventure is going.

Under a Black Sun Import Archive

I apologize in advance if I made a mistake with anything. Anything that's not right should be easy enough to fix.

Edited by OggDude

About the starship issue...

It would seem when starships are involved, this program becomes a major resource hog, as I watched my CPU usage shoot from 35% when running to 90%, even with no other major applications running. So if nothing else is running, I'm able to update starship stuff without too much issue aside from if I start typing too fast, the cursor jumps back several spaces, but again that's probably unique to me, given I'm running a slightly older PC.

Not sure if this has been reported or not, but one of my players (droid character) has been unable to save his xml with two obligations.
I've been able to replicate this on mine, but didn't try it with any other different races.

Obligations:
Obsessions 15

Bounty 5

Generally the first one in the list gets removed from the xml when the character is closed out of.

Here's the link to the xml: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8d-6E6IG83hZTZHeFpVSEFBZzQ/edit?usp=sharing

Edited by AliciaG

Not sure if this has been reported or not, but one of my players (droid character) has been unable to save his xml with two obligations.

I've been able to replicate this on mine, but didn't try it with any other different races.

Obligations:

Obsessions 15

Bounty 5

Generally the first one in the list gets removed from the xml when the character is closed out of.

Here's the link to the xml: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8d-6E6IG83hZTZHeFpVSEFBZzQ/edit?usp=sharing

Excellent catch! The same thing happens with duties and motivations as well. What you need to do is add two obligations, remove the first one, then add another one. Then save. When you reload, the (new) first one goes away.

Anyway, it'll be fixed in the next release.

About the starship issue...

It would seem when starships are involved, this program becomes a major resource hog, as I watched my CPU usage shoot from 35% when running to 90%, even with no other major applications running. So if nothing else is running, I'm able to update starship stuff without too much issue aside from if I start typing too fast, the cursor jumps back several spaces, but again that's probably unique to me, given I'm running a slightly older PC.

I did some experimenting. Just running the program kept a pretty steady 0% CPU usage for me, which would go to 1% or 2% if, say, I switched panes or scrolled or something. Playing around with vehicles or anything else didn't raise my CPU much at all, and it would go back to 0% when I stopped. Memory usage was rather high at 100MB, but not unusually so. I did notice that opening and closing forms (such as new vehicle, attachments, etc) would allocate memory and not give it back when finished, but that's just an idiosyncrasy of how .NET does its garbage collection. It did bug me a bit, though, especially when opening and closing the new vehicle form about 100 times eventually used over a gig of memory (!!!) without releasing resource, so I forced garbage collection after opening major forms and that solved that. I know .NET can be rather lackadaisical when it comes to resource management, but I did think that was a bit ridiculous.

I'm just not seeing the 90% CPU usage. Do you know what's causing your baseline 35%? Unless you're doing major background processing, playing a game, or running a database or something, your CPU shouldn't be working so hard. What's your memory situation? Maybe you're running low and swapping to disk a lot.

Edited by OggDude

Great looking program! Shame it won't run on my Macs...another reason I guess to get a little laptop running Windows

Great looking program! Shame it won't run on my Macs...another reason I guess to get a little laptop running Windows

You could just install a Windows emulator on your Mac, like a Virtual PC.

Does anyone use "Show Purchasable Items" in the equipment screen anymore? Now that you can purchase at a discount, it doesn't seem useful anymore and I'm thinking of just getting rid of it.

great program and ive read the FAQ so know Is there's no way to export a character [or adversary, vehicle, or group] as plain text, but is there a way/is it possible to export it to PDF?


i'm only able to print at my library atm and they're super strict on any programs being used, even booted from external sources
Edited by Chewmum

great program and ive read the FAQ so know Is there's no way to export a character [or adversary, vehicle, or group] as plain text, but is there a way/is it possible to export it to PDF?

i'm only able to print at my library atm and they're super strict on any programs being used, even booted from external sources

Refer to the FAQ, there's a PDF print driver you can install that'll create PDF files for you. Not sure if the library would let you install it though.

Edit: Another option would be to use the built-in XPS writer that comes with all Windows installs since Vista. XPS is Microsoft's version of a PDF file, although they're not compatible. You can copy the created XPS file onto a thumb drive or something similar (or just email it to yourself), then view it at home or on your Windows tablet. There's even apps you can download that will convert it to PDF if you need to view it on a non-Windows tablet, for instance.

Edited by OggDude

Next release is now up! I put all of the import directories into a single directory called "Imports". So, after updating, you might want to delete the other import directories. You don't need to, it'll just save you some disk space.

Release 1.1.0.4:
  • Obligation options were not capping extra obligation to the starting value. It now will.
  • Changed the character summary in the generator to be more asthetically pleasing (to me, anyway; the old summary was the same from the beginning, and was starting to look dated) and take up less space.
  • Moved obligation, duty, and credits from the top green bar to the new character summary. Also, added encumbrance to the summary.
  • Added starting and earned XP to the top bar.
  • Changed adversary summary in the GM Tools's Add Adversary dialog to match the new format in the generator.
  • Changed group summary in the GM Tools's Add Group dialog to match the new format in the generator.
  • Added a new button "Insert" to Add Adversary dialog's custom weapon, custom item, and special abilities panes. Clicking "Insert" will bring up a list of other custom items that have already been added to any defined adversary. You can then choose the item to insert into your list. This should save some time in creating adversaries (I, too, get tired of re-typing the "Droid" ability for each droid adversary I create).
  • Removed "Show Purchasable Items" in the equipment screen. This was only useful before the purchase dialog allowed you to pick your own price. Now, pretty much everything is "purchasable" if you can drop the price low enough.
  • Added a "None" setting to the sensor range on vehicles. Vehicles don't have to have sensors.
  • The Force Power dropdown was using the power's name as a key. This worked fine until I fixed a spelling error in the Foresee power's name. After fixing the error, the generator crashed when selecting the Foresee power from the dropdown with older characters. Fixed the dropdown so that it will properly find a force power based on its key.
  • Found another couple of places where the ad-hoc mod fix from 1.1.0.1 wasn't applying properly to items with ad-hoc mods when added to adversaries. The fix will now work for adversaries as well.
  • The force power editor had an annoying habit of scrolling itself back to the top after a node was edited in some way. It'll stay put now.
  • On WinXP systems, performing Imports and Exports could change the current directory, which in turn would cause XML files to be saved in the wrong place. All places that use open or save dialogs will now restore the current directory after use.
  • In careers, if you selected your career skills and/or spec skills, then changed careers so that they went back to being unselected, the totals at the bottom of the lists would not update. They will now update properly.
  • The equipment screen now saves your grid selections. Before, whenever you did something that would recreate the equipment grid (such as change species), the equipment grids' scroll location and selected items would be reset. The selected item will now continue to be selected and will be scrolled into view. Your current item will also continue to be selected when you move between weapon, armor, and gear grids (they were being reset before).
  • A strange corner case occurred with obligations, duties, and motivations. If you added two of any item, then removed the first one, then added a new second one, then saved the character, when reloaded, the top item disappeared. This was due to duplicate keys in the objects. This won't happen again, but existing characters with this problem will need to be modified and re-saved.
  • I noticed that .NET's garbage collection wasn't doing such a great job giving up resources unless it absolutely had to. I now do a lot of manual garbage collecting after forms close to force the programs not to grow too much in memory.
  • Added a new import directory for the "Under a Black Sun" adventure. This directory contains conversions of the stock characters, plus all of the adversaries. Just import whichever characters and adversaries you need.
  • The bottom right talent of the Politico specialization was incorrectly set to "Intense Focus". It has been changed to "Intense Presence".
  • After the above talent fix, I noticed that if you had selected "Intense Focus" in a previous character, it would properly have "Intense Presence" selected in the tree when the character was reloaded. However, when you printed your character, it still said that you had "Intense Focus". When linking specializations, it will now verify that your saved talents are the same as the ones found in the specialization at any particular row and column. If not, the saved talent will be changed to the proper talent (in this case, "Intense Focus" will be changed to "Intense Presence").

Can you bring back the "Show Purchasable Items" button please? My group keeps things very very close to pure Rules-as-Written, so seeing exactly what a character can afford based on actual book prices was really handy...

Thanks for your dedication to this project.
My players and myself are loving this tool and using it extensively for our campaign!

OggDude: Thanks for your work on this. I registered for the forum just post this.

Thanks guys :) If you have any suggestions for new features, please post them!

And a special thanks goes to Juan Castell in Spain for his donation. Thanks Juan!

Just need to throw in my thanks for this. Great job!!