Updates
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Nov 18, 2024
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Worlds Marketplace Reactivated - Update
For some time I had disabled the Worlds Marketplace while I worked on a few back end systems to shore it up.
Today I circled back around on the question, and decided to reactivate that feature. After all, it is pretty
important for people to be able to browse at least some worlds in the World Marketplace, if for no other reason
than to see what it looks like, and how it works.
That said, I will be the first to admit that at this point the worlds in the Marketplace probably need some editing
and finalization. And I fully intend to do that. But as a solo developer working on such a vast and sprawling
project, I don't expect the review process to be finished immediately. So I hope those who venture to the Worlds Marketplace
will be a bit patient if there are a few holes here and there in those worlds. I don't think there are, of course,
but I know enough after all this time to be aware that no matter what I think, there still could be. Review is
always a good thing. So if you happen to see any issues with any of the Marketplace Worlds, please do let me know.
It should also be noted that also at this point the Marketplace Worlds are the Proto-Worlds, so you need not
buy one from the Marketplace if you are a Basic or Premium GM. You can access the Proto-Worlds simply by using them
as your template when creating a new World. Conversely, for Marketplace GMs, who have a free subscription, but
can ONLY purchase Worlds from the Marketplace, those Worlds are for you. Enjoy.
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Nov 17, 2024
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More Help Files - Enhancement
Now I have added Help files for Place and Campaign.
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Nov 15, 2024
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Form Label CSS Update - Enhancement
Updated the Form Name lable so it looks a bit nicer and stands out a little more. I found it too common for
me to look for the form name and find it a bit too obscure (the font was too small, and it was not highlighted with
a dark background so it tended to blend into the header image too much).
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Manage Adventures Page Look - Enhancement
Gave more room to the Treasures controls, and removed an extranous label that was taking up room for no great reason.
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More Help Files - Enhancement
I have completed almost all of the Help Pages on the primary pages for Mythos Machine. Getting closer to a completed
help page system, and that's a good thing. Been a long time coming, and I'm sure glad to see this piece come to
fruition.
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Worlds Marketplace - Enhancement
Increased visiblity to the Worlds Marketplace by adding a button to the Player Mode page. When you are in
Gamemaster mode you can see the button to go to the Worlds Marketplace. When in Player Mode that button is
changed to one that allows you to browse Public Worlds that you as a Player can join. Before, to get to the
Worlds Marketplace you had to know to use the dropdown link in the Manage Worlds page... so it was kind of too
hidden there, though you can still you that button. As we develop more worlds on the Marketplace I will also
look to increase visibility to it further.
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Nov 14, 2024
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Nov 13, 2024
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Updates to Help Pages - Enhancement
Added the "Return to previous page" link to the Help pages. It's a nice bit of generic code that automatically
adds itself to each help page dynamically, and also handles the breadcrumb trail appropriately. Sweet. :)
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More Help Pages - Enhancement
Keep em coming! I want every page to offer helpful assistance. Also, later, the AI will be able to
do magical things with those help pages as they describe the core functionality of every page. Looking forward
to that... someday (in the not too distant future).
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Manage Adventure-AdventureGroups - Bug Fix
There was a bug where if any group happened to have no members the page would not handle that well. It handles
that situation much more smoothly now. Huzzah.
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Nov 11, 2024
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Additional Help Files added - Enhancement
My ongoing quest to add help files to every page continues. It's a bit of a slog,
but well worth it, I think.
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Additional CSS Modifications - Enhancement
Ongoing effort to update the look and feel so that the site looks nicer,
even if it still has 1990's written all over it. :)
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Skills and Combat Experience Gains Calculator Pages - Bug Fix
As it happened, if you added an Aventure Group to an Adventure and then
removed all the members from that group (perhaps they moved on to another team)
then these two pages would not load properly. Now, they will tell you that
there are empty groups, and tell you which ones, so you can quickly go in and
fix that, or remvoe them from the adventure. To make that easier
I added links to the Manage Adventure Groups page. Better.
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Nov 9, 2024
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Help Pages - Enhancement
I have used Cursor AI with Claude 3.5 Sonnet to help me create the help pages for Mythos Machine. I have
added more pages for Character Skills, Powers, Armors, Weapons, Equipment, and Manage Adventure, Adventure AdvGroup,
and Manage Account pages. That's a lot for one day! The AI gens required only modest corrections,
and are all nicely formatted and bullet point all of the key functions for each page. Nice. Note: this work
would have taken me probably two weeks or so, and would have been both tedious and more likely than not,
less coherent. For those who say that AI is not useful at this point, I do beg to differ. It is being a huge
time saver for my advancement of Mythos Machine.
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Nov 7, 2024
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CSS Updates - Enhancements
I updated the CSS in a number of cases, as well as reformated some controls and containers for certain pages
where things were not well aligned. I also updated the css for the Help file pages to make them more attractive
and easier to read.
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New Help Pages - Enhancements
Continuing to create new Help pages, and this time it was for the Manage World Elements Generate page,
and the Edit Money Exchange page.
At this point all of the primary Element Edit pages have an asssociated Help page. Very good.
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Nov 5, 2024
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Help Pages - Enhancement
I created a series of Help Pages for the Edit Elements features, such as Armors, Weapons, Equipment,
Skills, Powers, and so on. They are clean and functional, and I have tried to provide enough
information for new users of Mythos Machine to understand how the system works. I hope it will do,
though I think there is more work to be done there. And more pages to add. But it's a good start
and I think it will help get people over the inital hump. Mythos Machine is a fairly sophisticated
program that does a lot of things for Gamemasters and Players. As such it takes some time to
learn what it can do, and find ways of utilizing it to its full capacity. The more you understand it
the more useful it becomes. The Help Pages should... um... help.
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World Book - Enhancement
Provided some essential information on the World Book page to explain what it is
used for, and how to think about what to include in it. It should be more clear to
people new to Mythos Machine now.
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Character Weapons and Armors - Bug Fixes
Character Weapons and Character Armors pages would error for new Worlds if the world did not
have Stores with Weapons or Armors in them. This should be handled more gracefully now,
alerting the GM when there is an issue. Much better.
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Kits Inventory - Bug Fix
The Inventory was not updating the Available Elements lists between selections of different
Kits, which meant that items that had already been used in one Kit were not showing as
available for a different Kit. This has been fixed.
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Proto-World: Modern - Enhancements
Our newest Proto-World, Modern, is currently a bit of a work in progress, and I am
enhancing it with additional things, and also working on any issues that I come across
while doing so. I don't get around to this area of the codebase that often, so I'm taking
full advantage of our friend Terry's willingness to use Mythos Machine to create a new
world for us to play in! As he wants to run a Modern world, we now have a new Modern
Proto-World to draw on. Good stuff. Thanks Terry!
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Nov 4, 2024
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World Elements Generator - Enhancement
Added "Campaign" as another element that can be dynamically generated by the AI and
added to a Place with ease. This is really a sweet feature. While I don't recommend
using the results as is, I think it can be wonderfully helpful for brainstorming new
ideas. And in a pinch, if pressed for time, it could be a nice way to quickly augment
a world with Campaigns that players can immediately get involved in. So as of now the
World Elements AI Generator can create the following Elements:
Armor
Equipment
Weapon
Culture
Race
Class
Skill
Mystic Power
Place
Campaign
Sweet.
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Nov 3, 2024
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World Elements Generator - Enhancements
A variety if enhancements including more detailed controls presentation for Guild Classes,
and Mystic Power Gens. Also CSS updates for Look & Feel enhancements to things like labels
and other page controls, and all Edit Elements forms.
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Skill Category Update by Skill Book - Enhancements
I have added a method on the Manage Skill Category page to allow the author to update
all skills in a given Skill Book with the specified Skill Category. This will make
handling new categories much easier as the user can now just add those skills to a book
and then update them all at once, instead of having to do that individual, skill by skill.
Much better.
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Oct 31, 2024
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World Delete Error - Bug Fix
On the back end there is a reported error when deleting a world, though afaik the user doesn't
actually see the error. But still, errors should not be left to their own devices. Fixed.
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World Create Error - Bug Fix
In some cases if the Proto-World is missing data then it caused errors during the build. Fixed.
Note To self: All Proto-Worlds need to be checked for any remaining data holes.
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Oct 26, 2024
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World Elements Generator - Enhancement
I'm pretty excited about my new feature. 😁
It allows me to use the AI to brainstorm new elements for my worlds...
Armors, Weapons, Equipment, Races, Classes, Mystic Powers, Skills, and Places.
And the beauty of it is that I was able to complete this in 4 days.
I can tell you honestly, without using Cursor AI to help me do the development,
the same job would have likely taken me three weeks to a month. While not perfect,
it's a tremendous time saver. And now I have my lovely new feature. So great!
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Oct 16, 2024
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Elthos Forum - Update
Well, after a very long time of having no problems with the forum on the Interserver host... one day it broke. And after two days of fiddling
around trying to fix it, and failing, I decided to pull the trigger and update the forum to the current highest version that still works with .net framework 4.7.2,
which, after considerable additional fiddling and troubleshooting, now works fine. Great. All is well with the world of Elthos once again.
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Oct 11, 2024
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Character Elements Pages - Enhancements
I worked on improving the structure and look of the Character Elements pages (where you seleect the character's armors, weapons, skills, etc.).
I think it feels a bit nicer, and may be is a better page structure. Still experimenting, but it looks improved to me. :)
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Oct 10, 2024
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Character Sheets Print - Bug Fix
When printing out all characters in an adventure group I was inadvertently stacking equipment so that each character was showing up with the previous character's
equipment including their own. This of course was quite wrong. As this was not happening earlier, I suspected there was a flaw in a recent update to
the CharacterSheets function, and sure enough... I had forgotten to re-initialize the equipment variable. An easy fix. Done.
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Oct 4, 2024
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AI Image Generation - Enhancements
I decided it would be better to keep consistant format for the AI Generation so I migrated the code from the Characters Details page, to
the Character Image Upload page, so that it parallels the same method and location as the Places Images. This will be less confusing for
players and GMs.
In addition I also added the ability to select which artist you want to tell the AI to use to generate the images. So now you can select
an artist instead of simply taking the randomly selected one, and having to go out of the page and come back in to change the artist.
I think it's a bit nicer, and gives you slightly more control of the output. That said, I will admit, the AI Art Generation models
often fail to produce exaclty what is asked of them. In fact, they often miss details, such as saying the person is wearing a fur hat,
and the image shows them without a hat. That sort of thing. Slightly annoying. However, that said, I'm sure that better models
will likely improve the quality of output as time goes on. I'm looking forward to trying FLUX if and when it becomes available on Fireworks.
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Main Information Screen - Enhancements
Just a little bit of house keeping, and cleanup of the Main Screen. You get to it from the Admin Console by clicking the "Information" button.
Not much changed, but I removed some extraneous information on the advice of Donovan, my buddy whose been a long time supporter of
my lovely project. Thanks, man. You da best.
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Sep 30, 2024
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Updates to Pricing Information - Enhancements
A link has been added to the main screen on the Mythos Machine landing page for "Pricing", and links to the pricing information.
The pricing has been updated. Basic GM is now $3.00 / month with a 10% discount for yearly, and $6 / month with a 15% discount for yearly.
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Sept 14, 2024
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Character Print Sheet - Bug Fix
When printing all characters in an adventure group, the stats blocks for weapons and armor was stacking the data from each previous character.
It was a very simple fix. Works perfectly now. :)
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Aug 29, 2024
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Images Upload - Bug Fix
Well, somehow or other, when setting up the AI Image Generation method, I inadvertently broke the original Upload Images feature for Characters, Places and
the World Image. Durh... I didn't realize it at the time, but I looked things over and took the opportunity
to revamp that code and simplify it, resulting in cleaner, and fixed, code. Those features work as intended once again. Good good.
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Aug 10, 2024
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AI Gen - Image Generation for Places - Enhancements
I added a new feature to allow GMs to generate images for places via the Upload Images page. It works as nicely as one could ask for.
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AI Gen - GM Share Calculations - Update
I updated the procedure to allow the GM to see an accurate account of how many ACTIVE players they have across all their worlds.
Earlier I was not taking into account only Active Players, so the number was slightly off. Fixed.
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AI Gen - Account Page - Update
I added the calculation values that show the GM how many images they actually are sharing to the Players per week when they
change the Share Percent. This is helpful for allowing the GM to appropriately moderate the Share Percent.
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Aug 9, 2024
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AI Gen Javascript - Bug Fix
The Spinner control was inappropriately coming up and staying on the screen instead of fading during the AI Image Generation operation.
Fixed.
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Aug 7, 2024
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CSS Updates
A few updates to the CSS to make the AI Gen look and feel a little nicer. And so it is. The AI Gen
buttons now have their own color so that they can be more easily identified at a glance when the appear on a page.
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AI Gen Processing Updates - Bug Fix
A few issues have been ironed out with the AI Gen processing. Removed some javascript and replaced it with server side code
where the javascript was only adding unnecessary complexity to the client side. This can cause issues, and when it isn't
strictly necesssary I have found it better to move the logic to the server side.
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AI Gen Processing Updates - Enhancement
I also fixed an issue that I found where
the user when at 0 images could go into the console of the browser and remove the Disabled button tag, which would allow them
to then generate new images. As this is a cost factor for Mythos Machine, I included code on the server side to check the
images the user is allowed at that point, and if less than one then the function will exit before generating the image.
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CSS Refresh - Update
I had been using Expires = 0 in the MasterPage header, but this causes the entire page to not be cached whereas what I really
want is only for the css files not to be cached so that they will download to the client every time. This way when I update
the css on the site I don't have to worry that the users won't see the changes. Now they will. I updated the code to handle
this so that only the css files download automatically on the first MasterPage load. That should do the trick.
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Aug 6, 2024
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AI Generation - Phase I - Enhancement
FINALLY! After approximately a year of very long nights studying my little brains out, and learning all the ins and outs
of Artificial Intelligence in regards to Large Language Models and Image Generation Models, I have fully implemented the
AI Generation feature for Mythos Machine! Here are the implementation details:
I have chosen Fireworks.ai as the model hosting company, whose service allows use to use an assortment of models via their API.
Gamemasters will pay no extra cost beyond their subcription fee for the AI Generation service. A portion of the GM's subscription
fee ($3.00 / month for Basic Gamemaster, and $6.00 / month for Premium Gamemaster) will be used to pay for the images that the GM
and their Players create across all of their Worlds in Mythos Machine. Right now the pricing works out so that Basic GMs will
get a maximum total of 250 image creations per month, and Premium GMs will get about 450 images per month.
On the Account Settings page GMs will be able to select a percent of their total to share with their Players, which can be
anywhere between 5% to 95%. So if a Premium GM shares 10% of their 450 images to their players then the players will get
46 images to split among themselves. So if there are 5 players for that GM then they will each get 9 image generations per month
across all of the GM's Worlds. In order to mitigate the chance that any one player uses up all of the images before the other
Players have a chance, the total number of images per month for each player is allocated as a certain number per week. So in this
case the Players would get 2 images, roughly, per week. This may not sound like enough, in which case the GM could share out a
higher precent to their players. Let's say 20%, which would give the players roughly 4 images per week.
Now, it may turn out the GM and/or their Players become so enamored with the image generation features that they really want
to generate more images than the subscription fee can afford to pay for. In this case I have added a provision which should
solve this problem. On the Account Settings page GMs and Players can choose to add their own Fireworks API Key. Then, they
can generate as many images as they wish via Mythos Machine, but the cost will be on them to pay for. Now that said, Fireworks.ai
has very reasonable prices for AI Generation, with each image costing under a penny. But as you can imagine, those pennies do
add up, and since Image generation is so fun, it's like eating one potato chip... a lot of people just can't stop. And if that's
the case and they want to continue, then hopping on over to Fireworks.ai website, creating an account, and a Fireworks API Key is
really very easy. They charge on a Pay-As-You-Go basis, so you would only pay for what you use. It's really quite fair. And that,
I think, solves the problem of "too few images". I hope people are happy with the flexibility and fairness I'm providing in
this fashion.
What is perhaps unique about the approach I took is that the images are generated with the following process. First you
have a Character description, but when you create your Character the default description is a copy of the description of the
Race you selected. In the case of most of my worlds, for human that is "Two legs and a head. You get the idea."
Now the player can either update the Character description however they want, or they can click the "Generate Description"
button and have the AI generate the description for them. This receives the
Character's primary data, such as race, occupation, sex, personality, astrological sign, and Character attributes, Strength, Dexterity
and Wisdom scores, and then assembles this for the 1st AI Generation. From this information the Large Language Model
(mixtral-8x22b-instruct) receives the stats and is told to create a short colorful description. As part of this process it also
does a look up in the Elthos Database for artists that are known to create artworks in one of the Genres of the world. Let's say
your world has 'Wild West' as one of the Genres. The database will randomly select one of the Wild West artists, such as
| Frederic Remington |
| Charles Russell |
| Howard Pyle |
| Grant Wood |
| Albert Bierstadt |
The randomly selected Artist will then be used to help generate the image, but in that artist's style.
Once the description is created, the user can update it however they wish until they are satisfied.
At this point, the user can click the "Generate Image" button. This takes the total description, including the artist, and
generates the AI Image which shows up on the page.
IMPORTANT NOTE: AI image generation models are still somewhat limited. The image produced from your
description will likely be a rough approximation, and more often than not missing or misunderstanding some details.
That said, results are likely to improve over time as models become more sophisticated. Also note, you can always download
your generated image and edit it further using image editing software, and then upload a more polished version
for your Character when you are satisfied with the results.
At any rate, I'm extremely pleased with the fact that my year-long effort has resulted in this very cool AI feature. I hope everyone
will enjoy using it as much as I do! It's really fun! And I love the fact that with a couple of clicks I can get neat AI Images
for my Characters!
In Phase II, I plan to add more AI Generation features, but I have not decided which one's just yet. I have some ideas, but
before taking the next step I want to see how the current setup feels, and how well it works for people.
Lastly, in order for Mythos Machine to afford AI Generation I must charge the GM's who are using it. If you do not pay,
then you can't get AI Generation because I cannot afford to pay for it for you. The third party company hosting the models
demands payment, and therefore so do I.
This process has caused me to review my pricing model. I have decided to go with the following pricing:
| Tier |
Price |
| Player |
Free |
| GM Basic |
$3.00 / month |
| GM Premium |
$6.00 / month |
| Marketplace GM |
Free |
And so with this change I have cut the Premium GM price in half, as it used to be $12.00 / month.
Lastly, note, that the Marketplace GM (those who will not create their own worlds, but want to use Mythos Machine to run
games with their Players using Worlds from the Mythos Machine Worlds Marketplace) does not have to pay for a subscription fee.
However, they also won't be paying to
to use the AI Generation features, nor will their players have the automatic allocation of images per month. But any or all of
them can always grab a Fireworks.ai API Key if they wish and use that to generation images to their heart's content!
And with that, I want to say thank you to all those who gave me feedback along the way this year, and encouraged me to
hang in there and continue forging ahead. It's been a great journey, and I'm so happy with the results! Thanks again, and
enjoy!
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Jul 28, 2024
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Player GM Email - Bug Fix
Aha... the code as pointing to the wrong email address for the player's Gamemaster, and consequently sending the emails
off into space. The email address was 'N/A', and so those emails were not being sent out. Fixed now.
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AI Description and Image Generation
This has been an ongoing effort for quite some time. Anyone who tells you this is easy stuff that only takes a few minutes
really has no idea what they're talking about in July of 2024 (I do expect that this all will get a lot easier over time, though).
Right now I have Character description text able to be generated based on the character's attributes, such as race, class,
sex, etc. At this point the text and images come through and are pretty good, though as always with AI Generation, not perfect.
That said, the AI Generation is not the hard part. The hard part is figuring out and programming how this will work in terms
of cost. MM obviously can't afford to give it's users free AI Generation because it adds up and becomes really expensive, and
that cost would of course simply put Mythos Machine out of buisness rather quickly. So I've decided to siphon a percent of the
GM's Subscription Fee toward their use of AI Generation. And their players will be able to take a GM determined percent of their
total monthly allocation. At this point the GM gets images based on their Subscription Plan, and for Basic it is around 240 images
while for Premium it's around 450 images. This gets spread over all of the GM's worlds, and player base because no matter how
many worlds the GM has, they will still only be contributing a monthly subscription fee. So anyway, figuring this out and getting
the system to be both fair, and provide enough juice for it to be worthwhile, it takes a lot of tinkering. Believe me.
So that's what I'm working on now, as well as adding in the features necessary to allow the GM and Players to see how many image
Generations they have remaining. I will also need to tack on something for text generation as well, but the cost of that is low
enough so that this is a secondary priority. Image generation is expensive, and so it needs to be handled appropriately.
Working on it!
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Jul 2, 2024
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Default Screen Resolution Message
Added a javascript validation of screen resolution to let the user know if their resolution is not optimal for the site.
1920x1080 is optimal. If much lower then in some cases scrollbars may not be showing all the data for the page, as one of
our favorite users, Donovan, pointed out while using his tablet and laptop at low screen resolutions. Tricky to fix actually
so this message at least lets users know there may be issues ahead if they are on a low resolution.
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Apr 16, 2024 - Jul 1, 2024
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Onging AI development
Working on first-pass features for Generative AI in Mythos Machine. Coming along nicely, but there's a LOT to learn, so a
bit slow. Then again, when am I not a bit slow? LOL. My normal progress is known as "museum speed".
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Apr 15, 2024
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CSS for World Books - Fix
In the Elements section of the World Book, new paragraphs were indenting improperly. This naughty behavior has been fixed.
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Feb 21, 2024 - Apr 14, 2024
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Ongoing AI Research
I am trying to build an AI System that will help me refactor the site for a better, more modern look & feel. The research
has been going very well, but there's a pretty steep learning curve. Currently I am tyring get the AI to create a better css structure. It's
fascinating and a bit frustrating because AI is *almost* there, but not quite, and there's some risk that it will all sink back into the mire before
I can find a way to put it to good use. So I'm hurrying as best I can... which anyone who knows me will understand that that means I've increased pace
from Museum Speed to "hurrying through the museum, but not wanting to miss anything interesting". :p Wish me luck, folks. If I can pull this off then
you'll start seeing a much improved UI. Just not quite yet... if ever. AI is amazing, yet flawed, and daunting. Still, though, I don't give up
easily. So stay tuned.
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Feb 20, 2024
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CSS - BlockQuote - Update
Blockquote wasn't working correctly, and so I updated it. Otherwise, all seems well with MythosMachine lately! Woot!
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Ongoing AI R&D
I have been steadily researching and developing AI projects both locally and with the Open Source Community, in the hopes
that these projects will at some point provide substantial benefits to Mythos Machine. R&D is time consuming, but ongoing.
Stay tuned.
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Feb 3, 2024
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Departing Worlds - Update
When a player accidentally clicked the "Depart World" button on the Player Mode page, and then accidentally breezed over the text
of the "Are you sure?" dialog box, thinking the button would bring him to the world, not depart from it, it became a kind of hassle
for the GM to figure out what happened and fix it.
Now the system handles this more gracefull, and allows the GM to easily invite them back into the world. Whew. That was annoying.
Better now.
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Mystic Powers Selection Options - Bug Fix
In the Character Mystic Powers Selection Screen, players could see AlL mystic powers in the system! Dang! That was a coding foul up
which was easy to fix, but dang if I didn't realize the logic would do that the first time around. Took long enough to identify that
it was an issue, and figure out what was going on! I had been wondering, why is Vallnam winding up with Mystic Powers I didn't expect
him to get? Ohhhhh, that's why! Ok, fixed!
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Jan 6, 2024
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Allocation Worlds GM Character Gen Interaction - Bug Fix
We noticed during last night's game a minor defect. If the GM has a world set to Allocation or Hybrid Allocation for Requisites,
and the GM wants to create a character for a Player on the fly, they can do so, but when they do and assign the character to the
player, the player will see it, but if the Requisites are not locked by the GM then the player will see that all their requisites
are 1, and they need to update them and save -- which is wrong.
So I changed the system a little to make that process easier. Now, when a GM creates a new character, no matter the type of
Requisite Generation method, the requisites will be locked by default. I also put the checkbox in a more visible place for the
GM (the player will never see the checkbox).
This should help simplify operations of this kind for the GM.
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Nov - Dec, 2023
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AI Research
This has been a general learning effort to get up to speed on how Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning work with an eye
toward using it to help build a better version of Mythos Machine. There is a steep learning curve involved, so it takes a lot
of effort. I have also been helping the team that is working on an open source project called "Open-Interpreter" by KillianLucas
to transform OI into a more comprehensive system that can handle large scale projects. That has been going reasonably well. But of
course anyone who knows me will also know that I'm the world's biggest slow poke. So there is that. :)
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Nov 18, 2023
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Markup - Style - Enhancement
I added a new feature that allows the author to add style tags to their text items. This offers a great deal of flexibility
in terms of presentation. One can use this, for example, with the .OuterPage class to put borders, or border images, on the
sides of your prints, or whatever you want. It's enormously flexible. But you do have to do so with the Markup, because the
WYSIWIG editor will hide the style tags from you (since the WYSIWYG's job is to show you what the page will look like, not
what marketup tags you are using). This is another great enhancement to the site as it gives authors much more control over
the layout of their pages. Get on it. It's great.
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Nov 14, 2023
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Manage World Page - Added WYSIWYG - Enhancement
I modified the Manage World page to now inlcude the WYSYWIG Editor instead of the former "E" (expand) textbox for World Description,
House Rules and GM Notes. Once again, much much nicer. :)
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Nov 13, 2023
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WYSIWYG Editor - Bug Fix
The Editor had gotten a bit jumpy after updating the site to handle the CSS file loads dynamically, and got the wrong
load order. As it turns out Bootstrap css needs to load before summernote css. Ok. Fixed now. Nicer experience. :)
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Nov 9, 2023
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Skill Categories for Combat - Enhancement
Given that I was working on this section recently I realized that the old method of using the name "Combat" for the combat
category was probably insufficient. Some GMs, after all, may wish to name it something else, like "Conflict" or
"Battle" or whatever. So I added a checkbox to denote that any categoris the GM wishes can be designated as Combat
Categories. This allows the Weapons Additional Items page to fill the Weapon-Skill dropdown with whatever Skills
the GM has assigned to any of their Combat Categories. Much better, actually.
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Oct 26, 2023
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Skills Categories - Bug Fixes
Two bugs in one. First when creating a new world, under some circumstances, the world would have categories, but
the IDs were still linked to the original world. Woopse. Now you would never notice this and it had actually no effect
on the interface UNTIL you deleted categories in order to create a new set for your world. Then you'd find that you
can no longer edit your skills from the deleted category. Ouch. In addition it was failing to migrating the skills
from the deleted category into the General category. Double ouch. But it's all good now. Fixed. :)
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Oct 23, 2023
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WYSIWYG Editor for World Print - Enhancement
I got some advice from Tod of AsIf Productions to add a WYSIWYG Editor. It has been applied to the World, Place, Campaign, Adventure
screens and it works pretty nicely overall. Now instead of having to manually add markdown codes where you want to bold items, or
add other formating to your text, it will do it nicely for you. There was about three days worth of configuration and programming
stuff that needed to be worked out, and it's a useful "quality of life" addition to Mythos Machine. Thanks for the good suggestion,
Tod. Much obliged.
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Oct 17, 2023
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Character Print - Enhancement
Based on a solid suggestion from Sydney (thanks!) I have added a new print option for characters. If you select the
"Print Description Only" option then it will print out only the character's image, and their descriptive elements, such as:
Description: Two legs, one head. You get the idea.
Personality: Friendly and kind.
History: Born in the wilderness. Orphaned at birth, raised by bears.
Goals: Honey and fast cars.
Traits and Flaws: Has cute smile. Sleeps a lot in the winter.
Race Info:
Habitat: Humans live in almost every climate and terrain.
Notes: Variable
Class Info:
Class: Mentarian - Scientist
Description: Mentarian Scientists are Mentarians who have entered the science community
in order to conduct research and integrate more fully with society.
Culture Info:
Culture: Quantum Collective
Description: The culture of the scientific spiritualist. People who believe in Quantum Consciousness.
Values: Speed of Thought, Inspiration, Truth.
Norms: Meditative, serene, objective and above all, humane. The collective acts as a collaborative society
to help those in need, and pursue the highest states of enlightenment.
Institutions: The Temple of the Golden Sun is a mountain retreat in the Himalayas that acts as a center of
contemplation, meditation and learning for the Quantum Collective.
Artifacts and Symbols: A star hovering above a spiral galaxy.
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Oct 10, 2023
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World Book - Bug Fix
As it turns out the World Book page was not doing the right thing after all. Funny, but in some cases it worked,
but in others it sent along the wrong ID for the Element. Ok, so I figured out what I did wrong and fixed it.
Much better. You can now fill your world books with whatever you think your prospective players should see, nothing more,
nothing less. Enjoy.
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Oct 9, 2023
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World Print
Updates to World Print CSS to make the styling a little nicer.
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Oct 4, 2023
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Character Elements Management - Enhancement
I have modified the description field in each of the Character sub-screens, such as Race, Class, Weapons, Armor, etc, so that
it stands out a bit and is much easier to read than before. It is the most important thing on the page for most players so
it needed a bit more TLC. Now it looks much better.
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Character Management - Enhancement
I have updated the Armors table to highlight the summary row at the bottom. It's the most important information in the chart
so it deserves to be noticable at first glance.
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Site - Enhancement
I have simplified the pages by reducing the number of color frames there are for tables. This has the benefit of mitigating
the elements height issues that always make the site look fragmented. I think this helps.
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Oct 3, 2023
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Character Management - Bug Fix
There was a latent issue with the Character screen that I was unaware of until I created an Armor that had a large amount of
text in the description, in which case the data in the Armor table would overflow and mess things up. Now, to fix this I am
showing only the first 600 characters of the description field. That should do the trick.
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Sept 30, 2023
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Class Change - Enhancement
I have added a new checkbox to the Manage Class page, so if the character changes class they now can optionally
keep the skill they already selected, or remove them and replace them with the skills of their new class. Formerly
it was the case that GMs would change the class and so it was usually the case that all skills should be replaced.
However, on the occassion where the character is changing class by the players choice, the new option allows them
to not lose their existing skills selection.
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Sept 21, 2023
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Print World - Update
Updated Print World default checkbox selections and arrangement to make it a little more intuitive.
Also, I have been doing a LOT of Research & Development work related to Artificial Intelligence, looking for
opportunities to use it both to improve Mythos Machine code, and also add interesting and helpful features you may
enjoy. Please stay tuned. It's an arduous task, but I'm up for the challenge!
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Sept 3, 2023
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World Search > Edit - Bug Fix
The World Search allows you to search for every place in world that references a particular word or phrase. It highlights
all instances of the word or phrase in the text and provides an Edit Button that you can click to go to the page where that
item is found. With the Adventure Adventure Group Events, however, this wasn't quite working properly. In some cases the link
would bring up the Generic Events, which is not correct. This has been fixed now.
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Aug 31, 2023
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Adventure Tree - Update
I had removed the listbox for the Adventure TO selection in order to prevent GMs from inadvertently adding
Adventure-AdventureGroups to items to which they do not belong. However, this turns out to have been a mistake
as it also limits the ability of the GM to properly organize items below it in the list. So I made the listbox
visible again, and now we can manage campaign structures fully. Some GMs may inadvertently make this mistake, but
in fact they can always undo it if they do. So I think this will do for now.
In any event while the Adventure Tree is useable, I still feel it is too far from elegant to be counted as great.
The UX on it is still too difficult to immediately grasp, and even I have a bit of a hard time remembering
exactly how I need to navigate through it. But once I get used to the idea, then it becomes more accessable.
Nevertheless, I would still like to see this form improved, and the UI changed to make it more intuitive. At the
moment I feel it is servicable, at best.
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Jul 29, 2023
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ODS Bound Option - Enhancement
The ODS Bounds use the GRM Type (1d6 through 4d6) to determine the upper and lower bounds of Levels and Requisite related attributes
such as
Requisites (Strength, Wisdom, Dexterity),
Character Level,
Attack Level,
Armor Class,
Skill Level,
Mystic Power Level,
Mystic Attack Level,
and Mystic Armor Class.
Consequently, the ODS Bounds keep the system from straying beyond the GRM values. This is done simply to keep the numbers from going
outside of range in an effort to keep the math involved in calculations a bit simpler. There really is no other reason. And the
limitation does wind up limiting higher level characters by putting a ceiling on the maximum levels and armor classes that can be
used. So a 10th Level character in a 1d6 game is going to be limited by the ODS Bounds to a maximum of 6th Level. At lower levels
this is a safeguard because it means that monsters and opponents will also be limited to a maximum level as well. But, as mentioned,
at higher levels Players may find this constraint annoying. Thus, now in the World Config page, you have a choice whether or not to use the ODS Bounds
on a per World basis. Check the box to limit levels to the ODS Bounds, and uncheck to release the bounds. Remember to save the
World Config if you change the setting.
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Jul 22, 2023
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Weapon Damage Calc - Enhancement
When a weapon is ranged, like a gun, it should not add the character's Strength Bonus as a modifier. So now when you
create a weapon you can set it's category to "Gun-Missile", "Exploding-Missile", or "Energy" and it will not add the
strength bonus to the display of the weapon damage. To be honest this is a bit of a kludge workaround but I have plans
to update the system with a better solution soon. That one will allow the GM to create their own Weapon Categories for
each world individually, and it will not rely on a naming convention to handle this kind of thing. It will be more
flexible and reliable, and easier for the GM to manage. But for now, this will do.
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Jul 8, 2023
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Character Sheet Skill List - Enhancement
I added the Base Skill Level to the Skill List on the Character page so that it makes it
easier to see relevant data for using Helper Skills, which require the Base Skill Level
for calculating the Chance To Hit. I also rearranged the order of the columns so that
Mystic Powers and Skills lists have the same order of columns to make them easier to parse.
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Character Sheet Tooltips - Enhancement
Tooltip placement for cells that have Title/Tooltip elements has been modified to allow longer
tooltips the appropriate space necessary so that they will not automatically collapse when the cursor
touches them (which they were doing before). In a small handful of cases this was quite annoying, as you
can imagine. Fixed.
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Jul 7, 2023
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Adventure Group Auto-Generation - Bug Fix
There was a sublte bug in the code that does the Random Personality, Traits and Flaws for
Auto-Generated Adventure Groups where once in a while it would error. This had to do with
a misallocation of the array values. That has been fixed. :)
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Feb 27, 2023 - to Jul 6, 2023
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AI R&D
At this point I am now embarking on a new phase of the Mythos Machine journey. I am studying
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with two objectives in mind. 1) to create AI that
can help me to improve the Mythos Machine code and UI, and 2) to create AI features within
Mythos Machine to help our user base to do more creative things, faster and easier than ever.
This of course is a fairly major undertaking as in order to accomplish this I need to learn
a great deal, including Neural Networks, Tensor Mathematics, Python and associated tools and
environments, as well as get a conceptual understanding of how the various pieces of the world
of AI fit together. It is not a trivial task. But to this end I purchased a rather suped-up
machine that should service for learning purposes, and allow me to make the initial forays into
AI that will result, hopefully, in a set of tools which I can use to make coding, refactoring,
and expanding far easier than ever before. Which would be nice, and so naturally I am hoping
for the best on this. Wish me luck. :)
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Feb 25, 2023
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Campaign and Adventure Privacy - Update
When printing one's World you can choose to hide or show both Campaigns and Adventures. However, if you have some that are
Public, while others are Private then there was not a convenient way to moderate what shows up in the print. This was due to
an oversight on my part. The Interface didn't have a way for you to designate Campaigns and Adventures individually as public
or private. But now it does. :)
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Feb 10 to Feb 24, 2023
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CSS Updates to Look & Feel - Enhancements
Once again back into the breach. The Look & Feel of the site needs polishing, and so I went through another round. This time
I decided to try eliminating borders and drop shadows that make the site look too choppy. For example, if the heights of two elements
seemed offset slightly then the border lines and drop shadows would glaringly announce the fact. So I tried removing them, and
to some degree softening the color pallet so that these aspects would blend a bit more naturally. And so they do. I think it looks
quite a bit better. And CrimsonScorpio, friend of Elthos, agrees. :)
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Feb 9, 2023
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A Series of Minor Updates & Bug Fixes
Having vastly improved the Error Handling of the Mythos Machine, I am now going page by page hunting for hitherto inscrutable
(and often undetectable from the interface) bugs, of which I have found a number, and now, having a proper and complete stacktrace,
have been fixing them one at a time.
This process is a bit laborious, and a bit tedious, and a bit slow, however, the results are extremely worthwhile. Of course this
all has nothing to do with the features or the interface, but is entirely back-end work. Certainly not sexy. But necessary and
well worth the effort for the future. So plodding along. As Mythos Machine has a great number of features, it will take some
time to get through it all, but I'm nothing if not patient. One step at a time, and steady as she goes. Hurrah.
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Feb 6, 2023
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Happy Birthday Elthos RPG!
Today is the 44th Birthday for Elthos RPG! Celebrating with a massive update to the rear end! Haha! :)
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Systemic Error Handling - Update
When I first studied ASPNet back in the day the tutorials all said to have Try Catch in every procedure and to
handle errors as they come in. This turns out to have been horrible advice. For years and years I struggled with
looking for the source of errors without understanding why it should seem so difficult. The reason it was so difficult,
as it turns out, is that the error exception object loses its trace stack when you throw it. It took many many years
for me to stumble on a post that explained this point. It also recommended, wisely, having one error handler for each
ASPNet page. Really!? And so, having created error handlers all over the place, I now found out that I should refactor
the program to use just one error handler per page. Fantastic! But also an incredible amount of super tedious work!
Undoing the damage was going to be a terrible chore. I had thousands of lines of code that would have to be refactored.
So, in true programmer style, I created a software solution that goes through all the code and refactors it for me.
10,735 lines of code fixed in 1 minute. And the appropriate error handler added to each page to boot. Nicely done!
I am now going through each page to find hidden errors that I never could track down before. And lo! I found a few!
So fantastic. Happy Birthday Elthos RPG! We'll get Mythos Machine neat and clean for you very soon! Hoorah!!
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Jan 28, 2023
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Edit Skill and Mystic Power Books - Enhancement
Originally when creating Skill and Mystic Power Books you had to select each skill or mystic power in the list one at a time,
which would fresh the page with the information that describes the skill or power. You would then add the ones you want
for the Book by clicking the Add button, one skill or power at a time. This is for the convenience of the GM who may be new to the world and
not yet know the skills and powers all that well, or for those who simply want to review the item before adding it.
While useful in that case, it had the defect of being slow for GMs who already know this information.
Now, you can choose either way by clicking the Multi-Select checkbox option. When checked you can select all the skills and powers
in the list with checkboxes and then click the add button and they will all be added at the same time. However, if you want to see
the descriptions then you can uncheck the Multi-Select checkbox, and this will revert back to the original way, where each item you
click on refreshes the page, and shows you the item description. In addition, while there, I did a bit more styling work on the form to
make it look a little nicer. :)
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Jan 21, 2023
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Session Management - Bug Fix
If they tell you this stuff isn't squirrelly, don't believe them! It's definitely squirrelly as all get out!
Anyway, this time the Player Invite process broke for the GM. BUT!! With a little more tooling around, I got it
working, too. So hopefully that's the last bug on this front. I hope that this is the last bump on this particular
road, but frankly, it won't surprise me if there's more bumps yet. Just a hunch. But still, I'm actually half-convinced
that I have ironed out all the issues at this point. I hope.
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Jan 18, 2023
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Session Management - Bug Fix
Once more into the breach. Another issue came up with the session management where now, regrettably, the Webhooks
stopped working. Fix one thing, break something over there. Darn. However, I think I found the complete fix now.
So the three things we want seem to be ok (I hope): Multiple Tabs without Session bleed-over, Webhooks, and the ability
to process direct links from emails for Registration and other purposes. I think all three are working now! Watching
for any other stray weirdness on the sides.
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Personality, Traits and Flaws - Enhancement
I had a random selection of Personality, Traits and Flaws that were added to Auto-Generated Adventure Group Characters.
They were entirely random. Now, I have linked that system to the Zodiac and Planetary sign for each character which
each now get a random Birthday and Planetary Elkron to start with. Along with these they also get personality, trait and
flaws from the Elkron as well, randomized, but within the Elkron's purview. I'm not sure if they should also be added
to individual Characters that are rolled by players, but they are a bit fun, and it might at least inspire players with some
ideas... though they can certainly overwrite them if they wish. I'll let it ride for now and see how it goes.
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Character Print - Bug Fix
As it turns out, if a character had less than two weapons then there was a bug that would cause the Character Print to malfunction.
Fixed. While I was at it I also fixed a minor issue where if the character had no armor then it would print a blank line. No need
for a blank line there. Gone. :)
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Jan 8, 2023
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Adventure Place - Bug Fix
As you already probably know, Campaigns are assigned to a Place in the world, at some level on the Places Tree.
Adventures are usually going to be in that place, or in a place below it. So if the Campaign takes place in
a particular city, such as Boston, then the adventures are likely to take place at some sub-place location within the city,
such as the Mulberry Street fountain, or whatnot. Consequently, when the GM selects a particular Adventure
to work on the Places list will normally show the Campaign Place, and all the places adjacent to it, and
all of the related sub-places. However, in some cases a particular Adventure might be outside of the Campaign
place area, such as the party has to take a quick flight to New York. Yet, the GM still wants to keep the
Campaign place on Boston, or the scope would be too big. Therefore, in this case the GM wants to see the
entire list of Places for their world, not just those near Boston. So there should be a checkbox that says
"Show all Places".
Well that is how the Manage Adventure form is supposed to work. And now, after a bit of fiddling around, it does.
Great.
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Jan 7, 2023
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CSS Styling - Enhancement
A few modest updates to the CSS to make styling of labels more consistent, and a few other stylistic
changes that have made the site look a little bit nicer here and there.
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Jan 6, 2023
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Session Management - Bug Fix
The other day I made a change to the Session Management because we needed to allow users to open multiple tabs
without causing intra-tab Session Object bleed-over. That works. However, it caused a new problem. Stripe Webhooks
stopped working. So back to the drawing board. Fortunately, after a whole lot of searching and querying people,
and more searching (for 2 days), I found a way to have the best of both worlds. Just for future reference I'm going to post the
solution here. In the global.asax you need this code:
Sub Application_BeginRequest(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
'================================================================================
'== NOTE: STRIPE WEBHOOKS FAIL WITH 302 ERROR WHEN THE WEB.CONFIG HAS
' COOKIELESS=TRUE. THIS CODE FIXES THAT PROBLEM, ALLOWING FOR
' COOKIELESS SESSIONS, AND THE USE OF WEBHOOKS.
'================================================================================
If Request.Url.LocalPath.EndsWith("Listener.aspx") Then
Response.[End]()
End If
End Sub
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Jan 2, 2023
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World Book Print - Enhancement
The World Book prints whatever the GM has allowed to be printed to the World Book from the key Elements Tables,
such as Weapons, Armor, Equipment, Classes, Races, and so on. However, if the GM has not allowed any items from
a given table to be printed in the World Book then I do not want that sub-section to appear in the print out.
This required a ravamp of the SQL query that produces the table of Elements for printing. Now it is much cleaner
looking as it will no longer have titles such as "Known Weapons" unless there are actually weapons that are in
the World Book Listing. :)
I also updated a few look & feel aspects of the prints so that they not only have cleaner data, but also looks
more stylish and nicer generally. I also updated the Print to PDF CSS which now also has a cleaner look.
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Jan 1, 2023
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Guild Class Bulk Edit Form - Enhancement
The Bulk Edit form for Guild Classes (aka Classes) had a partially implemented feature but it needed to be finalized.
As it was, you could not see the Cardinal Classes in the Bulk Edit form, and the checkbox to show them was hidden.
This is because I needed to finish the code that would prevent users from changing the name of any of the Cardinal
Classes (Thief, Fighter, SpellChanter, Cleric) because those names are used in a variety of ways behind the scenes
and so changing the names of any of those would break certain features. At some point I plan to circle back around
and fix that too, but that's a job for another day.
While I was there I realized that another issue had come up which needed attention. When updating the Grid it is only
supposed to update rows that have actual changes (like you changed a value in one of the item's columns), and skip over
any that were not changed. This is to enhance performance, though frankly you wouldn't be able to tell the difference
in speed with the human eye. Nevertheless, I fixed that as well. The cause was a subtle one. PrivacyLevel is a TinyInt
but checkboxes handle that datatype differently than the bit datatype, and it was causing the validation to fail
even though the values were equivalent (but not equal). So I added a conversion to boolean for the field and it works now.
The failed validation was causing every row to be updated, which was unnecessary. A simple fix, and probably a somewhat
unnecessary one given you couldn't tell the difference unless you have a LOt of classes in your world, but better
for it to work correctly just the same. Who knows? Maybe some GMs will want to have a LOT of classes, yo.
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Dec 31, 2022
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Player Admin Console - Enhancement
I have replaced the previous version of the Worlds Information page with the new Worlds Browser that
allows Players to browse all of the Public Worlds and Print their World Books and/or Request Invitations.
I think this is a nicer and smoother interface and enhances the new Player experience.
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Dec 30, 2022
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Session Management - Bug Fix
The way the site is supposed to work is that you can open more than one tab in your browser and log in twice
and each tab will use it's own session objects and not interfere with each other. However, there was something
not quite working with it and session objects in one tab would override session objects in the other tab. A bunch
of research and experimentation went into the fix, but now it's working as intended. Whew!
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Player Invitation - Enhancements
The Player invitation method was a bit clunky before. The email you'd get after the Gamesmaster accepts your
invite request had some instructions for you to follow, but no button click to make it easy. I added the button
click to make it easy. So voila. It's easy now and works nicely. I believe that completes the
Player Invite simplifications I had in mind. It's now pretty smooth and silky. Voila, voila.
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Dec 22, 2022
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Print World - Bug Fix
When originally programmed I had in mind to have the Tree-view of Places allow the GM to select which Places
should get printed. However, that wasn't quite working correctly, as it would not always find the correct
values. Now it is working correctly.
What this does is allows the GM to de-select all Places, so that they can print just the Elements Tables by
themselves if they wish (ie - if they wished to make the Elements table a separate book from the Setting).
So now this gives GMs much more flexibility as to what gets printed out. Good, good.
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Dec 6, 2022
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Skill Requisite Associations - Enhancement
For a long time I've been thinking about creating a Requisite associate to skills, so that Skill Use Levels might
be influenced by the character's requisite scores. For example, a skill like Boxing might be influenced by a character's
Dexterity and Strength. Thus if Boxing gets Strength and Dexterity association then when the Skill Level is calculated
the Bonuses for both Strength and Dexterity would be averaged, and then rounded, and this would become a modifier
for the character's Boxing Skill. Hence characters with lower Strength and Dexterity would have a lower Use Level
than characters with higher scores. Kinda makes sense, don't it? So I added that to the system, and now Mythos Machine
will happily allow GM's to define Skills with Requisite Associations for Strength, Wisdom and/or Dexterity. Nice.
The effects of the requisites shows up, if it exists, in the hover over for each Skill so the player will know
that their requisites have an effect on their character's skill levels.
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Difficulty Level Type - Enhancement
Another thing I've been wanting to do for some time is to add Difficulty Level Type as a drop-down for Skills
in the Edit Skills page. Now it no longer needs to be written into the description, but instead is a handy drop-down
so that GM's won't forget it. Much better. This also shows up now as a field in the table of Skills for each
character to make it easier for the Player to know off the top how the skill gets used. Sweet.
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Nov 30, 2022
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Nov 16, 2022
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Invite Players - Enhancement
The list of the current players now includes their status on the Player Invite screen. Minor, but helpful I think. :) Also
improved the quality of the query, which before was showing the Gamesmaster in the list, which wasn't necessary.
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Nov 15, 2022
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Combine SLP + MLP - Enhancement
Our buddy Crimson Scorpio made another solid recommendation, which was to allow GM's to combine Skill and Mystic Learning Points
on a per-world basis. This option now appears in the World Configuration page.
The system allows you to distinguish between Skill and Mystic Power Learning Points
as two separate components, or combine them so that from the player point of view they only see Learning Points (the sum of both
Skill and Mystic Learning Points). This allows the players to use their SLP and MLP as if they are one thing, rather than two. The effect
is that they can spend those points on either skills or powers interchangeably. When these are separated then characters can only
spend Skill Learning Points on learning Skills, and Mystic Learning Points on learning Mystic Powers.
An argument could be made for either way, depending on your point of view, so we are leaving it up to the GM's to decide on a per-world basis.
The default is for them to be combined.
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Nov 13, 2022
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Character Stat Change pop-up for GM Lieutenants - Enhancement
The Form needed a bit more clarification on the labels to explain what the values are and how to work with the form. Done.
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Character Page Format - Enhancement
Our old friend Crimson Scorpio recommends tightening up the space on the page by moving some of the tables around. For example,
the Skills table can sit next to the Mystic Powers table. Trying that out.
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Nov 12, 2022
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Code Simplification - Update
Some code structures have been revised to simplify operations on the back end, increasing performance and improving long term
maintenance of the code base.
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Print World Method Centralization - Update
The Print World Method is a complicated piece of code that should be centralized into one code block for ease of maintenance. And
that is what I did today. A bit of a thorn patch, but I managed to get through it unscathed. :)
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Elements Forms - Buttons Repositions - Update
The buttons have been moved to provide a smoother user experience on each of the Elements forms.
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World Configuration - Player Update Method - Enhancement
When the GM should happen to change their World's configuration during a game, before the Player would have to log out and log back in to
get the changes. Now the player only needs to return to the Information Screen and that will reload the world for them. A bit easier, anyway.
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Equipment Screen - Player Message - Update
There was a code misconfiguration on the Equipment screen that suggested that the player was the World Owner when their character
attempted to purchase items to expensive for them, saying "Too expensive but you can let it slide since you are the world owner".
This was not accurate, and the problem was simply that the message was in the wrong part of the If Statement. OK. Easy fix. Done.
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Nov 6, 2022
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World Browser - Phase I - Enhancement
This new feature allows players to browse existing public worlds as a list, and provides a "Request Invite" button
so the player can send out invitation requests easily. It also provides a "Print World Book" button which allows the player
to print out to HTML whatever the GM has made publicly available for players to see about the world setting.
In Phase II the World Book will also include a print out of all of the Elements that the GM has made available for the
players to see as well. This will include Cultures, Races, Classes, Skills, Powers, Weapons, Armors, and Equipment.
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Aug 26 through Nov 5, 2022
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Elthos Rules Books
This period was used to create several new rules books and enhance existing ones. The new books can be found in our
Book Store on DriveThruRPG in the ElthosRPG Shop.
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Aug 25, 2022
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New Player Worlds List on Info Screen - Bug Fix
If a new player has not yet selected a world, and goes to the Information Screen, they would hit a bug. This
has been addressed and fixed in the code.
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Aug 12, 2022
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Character Sheet Print Out - Enhancement
Additional modifications to the Character Sheet Print out. Better placement of stat blocks. Improved code
efficiency for producing the stat blocks. The current format looks pretty nice, and commentators have given
positive reviews. Both the web site HTML and the resulting PDF format with equivalent quality.
I think this should do for now.
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Aug 11, 2022
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Character Sheet Print Out - Enhancement
I have updated the Character Sheet Print Out with a better design, and also fixed the formating for the
Print to PDF CSS. It now prints more cleanly to PDF. I have yet to finalize a way to include the character
image in the PDF so that it does not interfere with the spacing and positioning of the Stats Block table.
As of now the image shows on the left side of the stat block at a maximum size of 100px in order to give the
state block enough room on an 11 x 8.5 printout. Looks pretty good, though I had to force the margins to be
pretty wide for both to fit.
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Jul 16, 2022
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Adventure - Adventure Group Selection Page - Enhancement
Updated the selection method so that the page now allows the GM to select any number of Adventure Groups to add or
remove from a given Adventure with one click, rather than having to select each one individually. It was a bit
tedious before if you had more than one or two changes to make at a given time. Improved. :)
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Jul 14, 2022
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Adventure Tree Organization Page - Enhancement
This page needed a bit of clarification. So tool tips were added and the design of the page was modified a bit
to provide easier understanding of what the page does for the GM, which is, of course, to help the GM organize
their Places > Campaigns > Adventures > Adventure Groups > Events > Experience Gains.
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Character Page - Enhancement + Bug Fix
A little bit of CSS work went into helping the Experience Gains form gain somewhat better clarity, and a minor
fix to the code which was not showing the correct character name in the textbox at the top of the Experience Gains form.
Now it does. All is well.
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Jun 4 - Jul 7, 2022
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Database Work - Updates
Shoring up the back end is never sexy, and can't be tooted very easily, so I've mostly remained mum
while I do the long tedious work of validating stored procedures, searching for data anomalies,
and fixing code sequences to avoid possible data hazards in the future. It's painstaking and dull
work, but it simply must be done for the integrity of the system. That said, I am making good
progress and now have a nice batch of data validation routines that should help considerably going
forward. That's all for the moment.
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Jun 2, 2022
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Elthos Website - Updates
After too many years of suffering with the Elthos.com WordPress site, I have gratefully migrated off of that
platform and entirely revamped the site as a much more easily maintained asp.net site. I have spent the past
week finally able to update the various web pages with much greater ease and reliability. Thank goodness.
While some of the pages still require modest updates at this point, everything is more or less complete.
I can now return to focusing on the data issues related to the back-end dealings within Mythos Machine. Good, good.
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March 30 - May 30, 2022
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Ongoing Data Analysis and Updates
This is all very unsexy back-end stuff that needs to be taken care of, but is impossible to toot the horn about. None of
the updates are visible to the users of the system. But the work is nevertheless necessary and ongoing. Let it just be
said that the back end data is currently being analyzed and various systems are being consolidated for improved efficiency
and data integrity.
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March 22, 2022
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Player Invitation Streamlining - Enhancement
The Player Invite System was a bit clunky for GMs and Players alike. This has been streamlined to make invitations
easier to send and respond to.
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Feb 22, 2022
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Heritage for New Worlds - Bug Fix
There was an issue with the update to the Heritages table. The unfortunately consequence was that Heritages
where not being properly created for new worlds. Ah. OK, I see what was happening. Fixed! :)
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Campaigns for New Worlds Bug Fix
There was an issue with the Campaigns as well. Dang, when it rains it pours. The unfortunately consequence was that Campaigns
where not being properly created for new worlds, and that was causing something of a data issue on the deep back end where
Campaign - Adventures were not being correctly aligned. Ah. OK, I see what was happening. Fixed that now, too. :)
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Jan 27, 2022
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New Player Invitations - Bug Fix
There was a problem with the Player Invitations where the invites were not going through. This has been fixed and should
be working for everyone now. Invites away!
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Heritage Starting Money - Enhancement
On the request of one of our star play testers, Donovan, I added the ability of the GM to define for themselves what the Starting
Money should be for each Heritage they want in their World. You can use a set amount, such as 100, 200, etc, or you can enter
a dice amount such as 10d100, or 2d10, or whatever you deem appropriate for the Heritage. This is something I've wanted to do for
a while, and finaly had a few minutes to spare in order to do it. There you are, Donovan. Enjoy.
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Dec 27, 2021
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SLP and MLP Formula Processing - Update
When we CrimsonScorpio recommended the new Gauss Formula for Skill and Mystic Power Learning points we went ahead and implemented it.
It works well as is, but I also wanted to bake in a few calibrating variables so that the GM could moderate the effect for their world.
In case you missed it the new formula is an improvement over the original in that the first version had a linear progression for SLP and MLP,
which meant that the character would get the same number of SLP and MLP at each Level. The new formula however increments the advance such
that the character is able to select 1 new skill at the current level for each sub class they are a member of every time the level up. That's
a better arrangement. In addition this pass allowed me to consolidate the variables and similarize both the SLP and MLP formulas and apply
them evenly in Mythos Machine so that they now are paired together nice, yet with GM options to alter them via the variables each formula
has available for this purpose. So I'm very happy with that.
When we made the change I wanted to update Mythos Machine to be more versatile in handling any formulas that
we might throw at her in the future. These formulas (for SLP I have 13, and for MLP I have two) were hard coded in the Mythos Machine, despite
being stored in the database. I means that if I want to add a new formula or change one I had to go into the code to add or modify the code section
that processed the formula. Now, instead, I can simply add or modify the formula in the database and it will process accordingly without code
changes. Much better. While I was at it, I also cleaned up the World Config page and made that correspondingly generic as well, so it too will
flex with whatever formula has been chosen.
In case people have noticed that I haven't made any Mythos Machine updates since November, it's because I have been working on updating the rules
books with the revised formulas, which required one gigantic round of learning curve for me while I gain competency on Publisher Software. I have
chosen the InDesign look-alike Affinity Publisher for this as it's price point is much more attractive than InDesign. But it has required me to
import my current books into Affinity Publisher, which has been a time consuming adjustment. However, this too has huge advantages for me. One,
I am far more able to support new rules book versions without having to rely on third parties to help me do the Publisher work. Two, it also
gave me the opportunity to work towards a goal I've had for some time, which is being able to swap out images from the rules book easily in order
to create versions with my new artwork as time goes by. That's coming along nicely.
Ok. That's good for today.
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Nov 8, 2021
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Minimal World - Bug Fix
When creating a world the GM has the option to make it a Minimal World, which builds a world of the selected genre, but with the minimal
number of Elements in that world. So instead of having the Wild West Template World provide the GM's new World with an assortment of
Weapons, for example, it would add just one of the Weapons. So a Minimal World comes with one weapon, one armor, one piece of equipment,
one Race, one Class, etc. That said, there was a bug in the processing that caused some of the elements in the new world to be missing,
and that bug has been fixed. Good, good. Carry on.
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Nov 2, 2021
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Character Details Elthos Tarot - Enhancement
The Character details page allows the player to enter information about their Characters, such as physical description, personality traits,
history, secrets, and so on. One of the things it has always done is allow the Player to select the Character's Zodiac affiliation and
Planetary Elkron influence (to learn more about what these things mean in relation to Elthos I can highly recommend downloading my
free 14 page book on the topic at DriveThruRPG
Elthos Tarot Book - Foundations
)
What was missing before was a bit of flair, and nuance. So now that the
Elthos Tarot Deck
is finally online, I have decided to start integrating more of the deck into the Mythos Machine.
So now the Character page selects a random Zodiac Sign on Character Generation, and uses that to select a default Planetary Elkron for
each Character. And it shows these two selection's Elthos Tarot Cards on the screen. And provides a handy hover-over so the player
can see what the given Tarot Card's Elkronic Correspondences are, including things such as plants, stones, herbs, creatures, animals, birds, trees, and so on.
These elements can be used to enhance the symbolic underpinnings of Elthosian Worlds. Quite nice really. Another thing to note is that Players
can not change the randomly selected Zodiac Sign of their Character, but they can change their Planetary Elkron selection. This will help influence their base
Alignment, which will thereafter be influenced by the Player Character's deeds and motives throughout the course of the game.
All of this is intended to help bring the usefulness of the Elthos Tarot Deck into focus for GMs and Players. I do hope ya'll enjoy it.
I think it's perfectly grand. I will be publishing a new book on the Rules and Mechanics of the Elthos Tarot system at some point in
the not too distant future, so please stay tuned for that as well. :)
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Oct 24, 2021
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Places Tree Selections for World Print - Enhancement
Earlier while in the Print World page you could select a Place on the Places Tree, and when you clicked Print it would
always print from that place in the tree down the tree to the bottom leaf. However, sometimes you want to select some things
on the tree to print, but not others. So now there is a handy checkbox list on the tree for the World Print page, and you can
select exactly which places to print. That's a big help when printing out materials for Modules.
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World Print - Styles - Enhancement
When printing your world you may want to size things for print to PDF to be a little more specific than I had it before.
Now you can use Class references to set Widths to objects such as images in your text. Class="w50P" will set to 50%, while
Class="w200" will set to 200px. The list of possible classes to use for your text has been expanded to include widths, and
all of the possible classes appear on the Markdown Page along with their styles. This should help to get the exact look you want
into your PDFs. From there it's an easy upload to DriveThruRPG, or your favorite book shop! Huzzah!
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Oct 2, 2021
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Elements Lists - Enhancement
When a Player wants to learn more about a GM's world they can go to the World Info page and select "World Elements" which
will allow them to view basic information about the World's Weapons, Armors, Equipment, Cultures, Races and Classes. Before
it would only allow them to view information about the Cultures. This information may help the Player to understand the nature
of the world a little better before getting started. I ensured that the only items that show to the player are those that the
GM has made available for them to see. The other items will not show up in the list.
Conversely, when the GM goes to the same page, they can see all of the information about all of the items in the lists, and
can also elect to see Skills and Mystic Powers. And on top of that the GM can download this information to Excel if they want
to keep a local copy. Huzzah!
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Sep 27, 2021
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Class Elements Kits - Enhancement
Crimson Scorpio once again comes through with a sterling recommendation for a new feature. Introducing Class-Based Elements Kits.
What this allows the GM to do is set up Kits of Weapons, Armors and Equipment that outfit a given class exactly. Currently,
and what is being enhanced, is that the GM can Auto-Generate Adventure Groups, assigning Race, Class, How Many and What Level
the characters generated should be. Myths Machine then randomly selects Weapons, Armor, and Equipment for the Characters
based on the Class Associations that the GM creates for them. So if you have a class named "Soldier", then when the Auto-Gen
runs, it will look to see what weapons and armor the Class has associated to it and select randomly based on what it finds,
until the character is out of money, or a certain number of tries has occurred. What this does is create a somewhat random
selection of character, not just in terms of their stats, but also their equipment, but bound by their class. Which is all
good and fun for the GM because it allows the GM to participate in the game aspect by producing randomized characters which the
GM can then doodle around with.
However, in other cases this setup was not idea. Crimson Scorpio wanted to create sets of goons who all had the same
exact equipment, and the randomization aspect was tripping him up. Hence, the Kits concept. Now, you can create Kits,
associate them to one or classes, and then on the Auto-Generate Adventure Groups page you get a drop down for "Equip" next
to the Class. So when you select a class it then fills in the Equip list with "None", "Random", and whatever Kits you've created
for the class. So now, if you have a "Soldier" Class, you can auto-gen some of them with "Infantry Kit", and others with "Infiltrator Kit"
and others with "Sniper Kit", and so on. You can create as many kits as you want and assign them to any classes that you want.
Voila. Fun!
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Sep 1, 2021
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Character Page - Update
I noticed that in the "Show Calculations" section the Total Armor Class for Energy Armors was off. I looked into it
and found that I had used the wrong Armor Class Variable in that spot. I fixed it and all is well. While I was there
I also felt that the courier new font size was too small, and the color of the text a little too dark to read easily
enough, so I brightened up the font and increased the size for easier visibility.
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Adventure Tree Organization Page
The List of Campaigns, Adventures and Events was not ordering by World Date, as it does on other screens, which is important
because it helps the GM remember what happened in what order. So I fixed that and now they order by the GM's designated World Dates.
That definitely helps. I'm now finding organizing the Adventures much easier than before. Woot. :)
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Aug 29, 2021
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World Config - SLP & MLP Enhancement
The Skill Learning Points and Mystic Learning Points formulas selection drop-downs were hidden because of all the formulas
we tried, only one formula was utilized. However, when Crimson Scorpio recommended a new formula, we tried it out
and it seemed to work very well. So we are now offering two formulas. These appear in the World Configuration Page as
drop-down selections. I also added a description to each formula so the GM can understand what the formula's intent is.
Having updated the database with the new description field, and all the related stored procedures and code, I was able
to deploy the update within one hour. That's a new speed record for the project, thanks to the automation tools
I created along the way to help with such things. Nice. Now GMs can select the SLP and MLP formulas they want to use for
their worlds, and the variables that go with them. Lovely.
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World Print - Player vs GM Options
The World Print page offers a number of options that potentially make editing the World information for publication easier.
However, most of those options are really for GMs, not Players. So now on that page only GMs see the print options.
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Aug 23, 2021
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Group History Page
In my never ending quest to make Mythos Machine as useful for GMing as I possibly can, I have updated the Group History Page
so that you can re-order the dates for your Adventures and Events more easily and efficiently. And I styled the page a
bit more nicely as well. How do I know this page has a more useful arrangement? Because I needed to use to to re-arrange
the order of my World's Events and now it makes that easier. And it's prettier to look at too. Voila.
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Aug 22, 2021
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Manage Adventure - Adventure Groups - Update
This page allows the GM to set which adventure groups are members of specified adventures. However, the list of joined groups was
showing the full Adventure + Adventure Group name, instead of just the Adventure Group name. So it was a bit confusing. That has been
fixed. How both lists show just the Adventure Group name. Easier to read and understand.
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Aug 21, 2021
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Experience Gains Panel - Enhancement
On the Character Page there is an Show Options dialog box which allows you to select "Show Experience Gains". This opens a panel that shows
all of the character's experience gains, money, life and mystic point changes, per adventure in the order of the World's date, or if those are
not entered, then the game date. If you are the GM of the world then it will also show you "Edit" and "Delete" buttons. Earlier this panel
appeared at the bottom of the character page, so when you clicked the option to see it, you had to scroll to the bottom. I moved it to the top
to make it more convenient. I also added a better "Edit" function so that now, instead of having you edit the changes in the grid view which is
really small and really just not a convenient layout for editing (perfect for reviewing as it may be), it brings you to the Experience Gains Screen
to the selected entry and lets you edit in style. Much nicer. I also fixed a bug where before the delete command was ignored. Now it deletes
the selected item as it should. So all is well. It's prettier, works better, and shows a cleaner set of data, and is ordered in the rows
according to an appropriate date time. Much better.
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Aug 18, 2021
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World Configuration PreSets - Enhancement
When you create Worlds in the Mythos Machine you can configure the settings for each world individually. You go to the World Configs page and
it offers you a whole bunch of options. These options are designed to allow you to flavor the world, as well as configure it for different
styles of play. For example, you can slow down the Experience Gains rate so that your worlds tend to have a slower Character advancement, which
you might do for long terms Campaigns. Or you can change the number of bonus Skill Learning Points characters receive at each level. And so on.
There's a lot of options there so GMs can shape their worlds however they wish. Wonderful feature.
The new feature is called World Presets. This allows me as the system owner to create a set of Configurations that make it easier for the GM
to pick among various World styles. For example, I might have a PreSet for "1D6 - Balanced Odds - Fast Action - Slow Growth - Deadly Adventures", and a different
one for "2D6 - Easy Odds - Medium Fast Action - Fast Growth - Fairy Tales for Kids". And so on. It also allows each GM to define their own
PreSets which they can then apply to any or all of their own Worlds. You can name the PreSet and give it a description, and it will apply all
of the World Configuration Settings to whatever World you apply it to. Or you can always easily revert back to the World's original Configuration
if you want. All with a click of a button. The Mythos Machine does all the number crunching to make this happen. It's just grand, I tell ya.
Just grand. :)
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Aug 13, 2021
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Campaign Management - Bug Fix
When I added the feature (of course) that allows the GM to go from the Adventure Tree Organization Page to the Campaigns Management
Page, it was not quite identifying the correct node to land on in the tree. I added a bit of code, and voila. It works now.
Good good.
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Aug 7, 2021
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Experience Gains Filtering for Player Characters - Enhancement
I just added some helpful filtering for Players when viewing their Characters. They can click the Show Experience gains option
which will show them the entire list be default. If they want they can filter by selecting the options buttons: All, Money, Life Points,
Mystic Points, Experience, any of which will filter the list so that only items where those values changed are shown. I'm pretty sure
that will be something the players find useful. I know I will as GM. That's fo shizzle.
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Aug 2, 2021
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Adventure Tree Organization - Enhancements
Further refining the system to make it work more smoothly. Now when you enter the form if you have previously selected a
Campaign / Adventure on any previous pages the Adventure Tree Organization form will remember that and select those in the lists
for you. Definitely something I want it to do.
I also modified the Character page so that when Lt GMs select the Experience Gains option, it will only show them the list of
Campaigns that the GM has assigned for their Party, instead of the entire list of Campaigns for the whole world. That will help
to prevent the Players from guessing what's ahead based on the names of Campaigns. That's also something that is pretty important,
though it does require that the GM remember add the PC groups to the adventures so that they will appear in the list. Of course
even if the GM forgets, it only takes a few seconds to add the group to an adventure. I think that's better as a method than letting
them see all the Campaigns in the world, frankly. Anyway, so far so good. Coming along nicely.
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Jul 31, 2021
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Experience Gains - Filtering - Enhancement
I added a nice little convenience item for GMs to filter Experience Gains so they can view just the GM Lieutenant entries,
which will give the GM a quick way to review them after the game to make sure that they look ok, and edit them easily if necessary.
This option appears at the top of the Manage Adventures Experience Gains page as a checkbox which reads "Show Only GM Lieutenant Entries",
and filters those entries for the currently selected Adventure. Nice touch and will be helpful.
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Jul 30, 2021
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Experience Gains - Record Keeping - Enhancement
In order to keep the data entry to an absolute minimum for the Lieutenant GM I am only asking them to fill in the Reason Field,
and the numeric changes. The way I was doing it originally would prevent the GM from changing the Lt GM entered comments, however,
and so I fixed this by adding the encoded information in the record name instead. So now the GM can modify the comments as they wish
and we still have a key by which to discern which records are GM LT entries for display purposes later. Voila.
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Jul 26, 2021
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Experience Gains Page - Enhancement
The Experience Gains Page is where GMs can add the detailed events of their player's adventures, and by doing so allow the Mythos Machine
to automagically tally up their Experience Points, Life Points, Mystic Points and Money. The page was mostly fine, but was a little bulky
looking and a bit awkward from a Look & Feel perspective. So I went through the labor-of-love that is polishing the thing.
It now looks clean and fit, like it should. And with that, I believe that the polishing phase for Mythos Machine has finally completed,
as there are no other pages that I know of that have rough areas that make them difficult to use.
That said, of course the Mythos Machine will always be in a state of continuous quality improvement as I refine and polish it over time,
and perhaps add new features, or mosify existing ones to make them more useful. So don't worry. My work is not ended. It's only just begun.
Which of course makes me happy.
The next phase will involved revisiting the question of "How the heck do I market this wondrous thing??" ... you'll be hearing more about that
hopefully sooner rather than later. Or better yet, you'll be seeing more about Elthos RPG Mythos Machine out in the wild, which would be
the best thing since 20-sided Dice, of course.
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Jul 24, 2021
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Adventure Tree Organization Page - Enhancement
The last Great Rough Spot of the Mythos Machine was something that I've contemplating fixing for a long time. My original
design for it was functional, but horribly counter-intuitive and difficult to use. Even I was confused by it. So finally,
after much hemming and hawing, I set about figuring out how to simplify it so that it would go from Functional-but-practically-useless
to "Ok, this works for me". The hard part was figuring out how to design it so that it is both visually clear enough to be grasped
at a glance, while still retaining all of the functionality of the original design. It's purpose is to allow you to move stuff around
in your Place-Campaign-Adventure-AdvGroup-Events-ExperienceGains hierarchy. So if for whatever reason you want to reorganize your
Campaign, maybe splitting one adventure into two, and then want to move some of the events from the original adventure into the
new one, that you can do so. No, I do not expect this to be heavily used. But it must be available in case it is needed.
The new design is far more intuitive. I know, because now I feel comfortable using it, and it no longer makes me wince or
scratch my head and ask "um, ok, what do I do again?". Woopie! Much better! Took a lot of work in the design phase (weeks)
for me to figure out that the design can really be as simple as it turned out to be. Sometimes the simple solution is just kind
of hard to realize. But now - well, there it is. And I'm well pleased. Because I can use it, finally. :)
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Jul 2, 2021
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Skill Learning Points - Player Information - Enhancement
I have added the SLP and Experience Leveling chart to both the Character Class and the Character Skills Selection Pages.
When the user hovers over the information button they will see the chart which will let the know for the selected Class
how many SLP they will get per level (up to 12th) and how many Experience Points are required to obtain to achieve each
Level for that Class as well. This is intended provide them with enough information to make an informed decision.
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Jul 1, 2021
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Jun 22, 2021
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Jun 18, 2021
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GM Lieutenants - Enhancement
I went ahead and added the Experience Point gains as well. So now the GM LT (and/or GM) can easily modify Life Points, Mystic Points, Money, and
Experience Gains (or losses) from the Character Page. This is a big improvement. Also the earlier version created one new record in the Experience
Gains table for each of the changes (so one record for Life Points change, one for Mystic Points, etc). Now it will encapsulate all of the
changes in one record only. Lastly, I fixed a bug with the client side javascript so that it behaves better during the validation, and also
updated the CSS to give the form a little bit nicer look. Overall, not bad for a night's work. :)
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Jun 17, 2021
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Introducing GM Lieutenants - Enhancement
By popular request among my play testers I have been working on a new feature that allows GMs to assign Lieutenant GMs from among their players
for any given world. Once assigned the Players then see new buttons on the Character page which brings up a dialog box in which they can select
the current Campaign, Adventure and Event, or create new ones. It also allows the GM LT to modify any Player Character in their Adventure Group by
setting their current life points, mystic points, or money and provide a reason for the change.
The purpose for this is to allow the GM to assign these tasks to players so that it can take some of the load off the GM's shoulders during game play.
Now the players can update their own stats, and each others, at the discretion of the GM. We are going to be using this extensively going forward.
The next enhancement to this form will be to add a field to allow the GM LT to also record actual Experience Gains with reasons. I may even add the
fields for Alignment changes as well. We'll see.
Future enhancements may allow the GM LT to link to the Skills and Combat Experience Gains Calculation Pages, which will thereby allow them to also add
Experience Gains as well. But one step at a time.
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May 29, 2021
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Print World - CSS - Update
The formating of the Print World CSS was offsetting some elements in a way that was visually displeasing to me.
I corrected those, and now the document looks that much cleaner and more well organized.
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May 28, 2021
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May 23, 2021
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Edit Races - Update
The form presented data in a way that was not as visually clear as it could be. I moved some things around,
and toned down the colors, reset some CSS for the Panels and now it is easier to read.
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May 18 , 2021
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Contact - CSS - Update
The Contact forms had issues with CSS that needed to be dealt with. Updates were made, and the CSS is improved now. I doubt it is
quite perfect, yet, but serviceable at the moment. I will take another stab at it again in a day or so.
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May 16, 2021
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May 10, 2021
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Print World - Raw Text Export - Enhancement
A slight, but useful enhancement to the Raw Text Export to a plain notepad (*.txt) file. It will strip out all
in-line HTML and Markdown tags for a clean copy which you can then easily import into software such as
Affinity Publisher.
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May 7, 2021
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Mythos Machine - CSS - Enhancements
I've been consolidating the CSS to make updating the Look and Feel of the site a little easier and more consistent.
That's been going well. I have changed some of the coloring, and added a method for making the bottom of each page have a
flat shaded line so that the jagged look which occurs when elements do not have the exact same height is gone. That's a
good thing. Took a bit of CSS trickery to get there, but I'm glad to have it. The site looks cleaner and the color scheme
is improved. Sweet.
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May 6, 2021
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World Print - Plain Text Enhancement
Mythos Machine allows you to print your World to HTML, or MS Word, and nominally (though not perfect), Markdown language.
Once in Chrome you can then Print the document to PDF. Now these are pretty reasonably well formatted documents and you could
load them as-is to DriveThruPRG if you wanted. However, some people might want to get into the document after the download and
really format it as nicely as possible in a program like InDesign, or in my case, Affinity Publisher (which has most if not all
InDesign features, but costs only $24). Publisher allows you to import a PDF and flow the text into its Text Frames. That's
pretty good and gets you quite a bit of the way there, though there is still a good deal of manual work that has to go into
finalizing your final PDF. When your done, you can Export to PDF and have a shiny new file. All of that is well and good.
As part of my exploration of this method, however, I found that Publisher doesn't have a way to natively transform Markdown or
HTML tags into styles in the document. So you have to do that manually. Still something of a chore.
At any rate, here's the Mythos Machine Enhancement that came out of all of this. You can now also choose to download your
World into Plain Text. You will get a Notepad file that has your document in it. It will include, if you have added any, your
in-line Markdown. Or if you don't add any, then your text printout will be that much cleaner. The text printout does not include
images (of course). So with the text in hand you can easily flow the plain text into your Publisher document and have at it. This
saves you from having to reformat all of the PDF elements in case you don't care for them as is when they get produced by Mythos Machine.
Anyway, probably most of you won't need this feature. But it's there in case you do. Enjoy.
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May 2, 2021
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Character Printout - Enhancement
My play tester buddy Crimson Scorpio made a recommendation for switching the order of the Armor Stats so that the most
important one's appear at the end of the list on the right side. Yep. Good call. That way the GM can find the most
important stats more easily during the game. Makes sense. So The order now has the Damage Absorption (DAB) on the right
next to the Total Armor Class.
While I was at it I decided to update a few other items on the form. Now the space for the Weapon names is greater
and I also separated out the damage into a discrete column instead of tacking it onto the name.
And while I was at that I also updated the Equipment list so that when you have multiple items of the same kind,
such as Hand Grenades, it doesn't list each one separately, but shows you the total number you have and provides
the listing once. Which is much better.
Another good day of progress here. Woot!
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May 1, 2021
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Armor Dressing Room - Enhancement
Adding a little bit of elegance to the Dressing Room it now color codes the differences between your character's current stats
and the revised ones after trying a new armor on, so you can spot them instantly. Green indicates the stat is improved,
while red indicates it is diminished. Also, I fixed it so that when you are trying on an armor that your character is already
wearing, it lets you know with a little text that tells you so, just in case you might not get why the stats don't change in
that case.
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Apr 30, 2021
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Armor Dressing Room - Enhancement
Time to put on armor and prepare for battle. But which armor is best for your character? The "Dressing Room" helps you
to find that out! But earlier the Dressing Room was kind of tiny, and had no mirror and was lit with a dim little bulb.
So I went ahead and renovated. Now the new and improved Dressing Room shows you what you really want to know... how does
the armor that I'm trying on really effect my Character's stats? Now it shows, as it should, what your stats are
wearing your currently used armor, and what your new stats will be when you don that shining new piece of armor
you've been hankering for. And now the Dressing Room is front and center where you can more easily see it than before.
Much improvement. I also updated a minor issue with the CSS in regards to stat labels while I was at it. All is well and
looking good. Huzzah.
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Apr 25, 2021
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CSS Changes- Update
Further CSS progress has been made. One of my players, long time buddy, Chris, mentioned that the breadcrumb at the
top each page below the main banner gets scrolled out of view on pages where you need to scroll down. Thinking about this
I realized (duh) that only the inner portion of the page should scroll, not the entire page below the banner. It should also
have a set height related to the user's screen resolution. And lastly that it shouldn't look like crap when viewed on a phone or
tablet. So that took quite a bit of fiddling around but I finally got something that looks pretty good. I also made
a few minor adjustments to other elements to make things look a bit nicer as well. Such as on the Character page it
was the case that the Skills, Powers, Armors, Weapons and Equipment tables were the width of the page and butting up
against the right side. I had set them to go 90% but that wasn't actually working. So I went ahead and fixed that as well.
Among other things. Overall, not a bad for a few day's work.
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Apr 22, 2021
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CSS Changes - Update
Starting to make speed on the CSS side of the project. To help I created a tool set (SQL Server + Asp.Net / VB.Net) that
allows me to load all of the pages HTML and Back end code line by line into a database so that it can be queried more
easily than I can do any other way. From there I can search for common issues and fix them in the database, and then
export all of the files back out and replace them. This will help a lot to make the site more cohesive. It's still not
a fast process, but it's definitely faster. So CSS updates are coming. Site should incrementally improve over time.
I spent about a week developing the tool, which I call StylishCSS, and now I'm back to working on the site... only
faster, better, stronger. Woot!
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Campaign Management - Bug Fix
I do not know how I missed this, but on the Manage Campaigns page it seems that if you clicked a Place
in the Places Tree that did not have a Campaign already, it would error. Looking at the code I realized it was doing
stuff it didn't need to do, and so not only did I squish the bug, but I optimized the page as well. Ok. That's good.
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April 12, 2021
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CSS Updates - Enhancements
Ok this is a LOT of grunt-work. Tedious, difficult, and without any visible changes to the site
it makes it feel a bit unrewarding. I mean what can I say? "Hundreds of CSS updates to the site
but the goal was to make the changes without you noticing anything having changed! Woot!!" It's a
bit of a tough sell. But this work is really essential for the future advancement of the program.
Over the years I've layered in a variety of CSS solutions to things, sometimes as quick and dirty
fixes, sometimes to experiment with how CSS works so I can decide on best methods, and so on. Now
is time to clean up and get the house in order. You won't notice the difference, but ... the site
will be better for it. And if all goes well, you'll start to see that the site becomes more efficient,
and the Look-n-Feel will become more consistent. And ultimately I'll be able to host different CSS
templates easily, and you'll have must better options for how you want the site to look for your own worlds.
Trust me, it's a good idea.
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April 3, 2021
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Heritage - Enhancement
Earlier the Heritage was limited to exactly six levels in order to philosophically conform to the "One Die System" concept.
However, this is probably too limiting for some GMs. So the system now lets GMs create however many Heritage Levels they want.
Starting money will still be 100 * HeritageLevel. Meaning that the first item in the list will be 1 * 100, the 2nd item
will be 2 * 100, and so on. So if you have 10 items in the list then the 10th item will be 10 * 100. So Ultra-Overlords would
if they were the 10th item in the Heritage list, start with 1000 units of base currency when their character is generated.
This should provide GMs with a bit more flexibility, and that's probably a good thing.
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Mar 30, 2021
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Character Prints - Enhancements
The Character Prints to HTML have multiple purposes, and one of them is for the GM's to print them all on a single web page
so that they can be quickly scanned via scrolling rather than having to click through to each character on the character screen.
However, some information was missing from those prints. Namely the InUse Weapon did not show up, and also the descriptions
of the weapons and armors didn't show up up either. In cases where the GM created neato rules for their weapons and armors,
this was a drag. So now the prints include the InUse weapon, and two more weapons, if there are any, and also the
full descriptions of the weapons and armors. In addition the font for the character stat block was set at 9pt,
but that was too small, so it's been upped to 12pt for readability. Also fixed was a minor typo. Woot! Good times. :)
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Mar 28, 2021
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Campaign Management - Bug Fix
Due to the recent revision of the Adventure Tree page works, a minor bug was introduced to the Campaign Management
page. When coming into the page you might not see your Campaigns unless you came in from the Adventure Tree page,
rather than the Places Page. Fixed. :)
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Mar 27, 2021
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Mystic Book - Class Management - Bug Fix + Enhancement
There was a problem with Mystic Books relation to classes which was a bit tricky to discover. The problem was that if
you had a class that you had assigned as mystic, and then assigned a mystic book as default to that class, and then later
changed the class so that it is not longer mystic, then the book would remain. This caused some downstream confusion
where Mythos Machine would create mystic powers for characters of that class based on the book, even though you designated
the class as non-mystic. It was hidden from the GM because the "Classes of the Selected Book" list would only show
Mystic Classes, which makes sense, except in this one case where you need to unassign a book. So now there is a handy
"Show All Classes" checkbox so you can unselect a book if necessary, even after having assigned a class as non-Mystical.
A bit convoluted to explain, but ... the site works better now.
A related issue was that once the character had mystic powers which were acquired by auto-gen in those cases, then Mythos
Machine would show you the "Select Mystic Powers" button, but since the class of the character is non-Mystic, it wouldn't
let you get to the mystic powers page to unassign the powers. Darn. But now that is fixed as well, as now the IsMystic
check looks for books as well as class designation. This is still a bit more complex than necessary as I can now
phase out the class designations of "fighter thief spellchanter and cleric" since we are no longer using that method
to determine if a class is mystic or not. Next round. For now, this will do.
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March 22, 2021
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Player Invitations on the Player Intel Page - Enhancement
As Crimson Scorpio pointed out, we needed to have a Player Invitation feature also added to the Player Intel Page. After all
you see the player list there, and it seems natural that you'd want to also be able to send out invitations from there, as well
as from the Worlds page. So there you have it. Works just as nice as nice can be. :)
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March 18, 2021
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World Adventures Tree Console - Enhancement
A few of my fellow GMs on Mythos Machine have mentioned along the way that it would be good to be able to see lists of all Campaigns, Adventures
and Events so that if you know what you want to go to, you don't have to drill down through the list hierarchy to get there. So now on the
World Adventures Tree screen you can now select a checkbox labeled "Show All" on the upper right of the hierarchy tree and it will fill
all of the lists completely for your entire World at once. You can then click on any Campaign, Adventure, or Event and click the related button
to immediately jump to that item on the appropriate edit page. Nifty. I'm sure this will come in handy!
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March 11, 2021
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Password Management - Update
There are two places you handle your password. One is on the landing page, and the other is in the account page. Both of these needed updating.
The landing page now has a "Forgot Password" link that allows you to reset your password and will send you your new password to your email account.
The Accounts page now has a (working) Change Password feature that lets you type in your old password, and set a new password for yourself.
While hardly ever used, when needed this is pretty important stuff. So there you go. Hope you don't need it, but if you do, it's there for ya.
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March 8, 2021
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Things to Elements - Enhancment
There's been a long standing ongoing debate among members of my crew about the use of the word "Things" to describe world objects
such as Weapons, Armors, Equipment, Skills, Powers, Races, Classes, Cultures, and so forth. We all were in agreement that "Things" was not a
great word to use. It just sounds a bit awkward. "You can create your World Things by doing xyz." Meh. But try and try as we might, none of
us could come up with a replacement word that fit. "Items"? No. "Objects"? No. "Components"? Almost but still meh. Finally, I resorted to
using a Synonym search... and after an exhaustive and almost inconclusive search found ... "Elements". Ahhhh... now that has a nice ring
to it, and maybe even hints at connotations and reflections. Mmmm... I like. And so "Things" has been changed to Elements in the Mythos
Machine Interface. I will of course also need to go through the Rules Book and update that as well. But for now, a Mythos Machine update will do.
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Feb 8, 2021
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World Printout - Update
Added Unordered Lists and List items to the Markeup so you can create nicely formatted Bulleted lists in your World Prints. I like. :)
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More CSS - Updates
CSS is tricky business. Anyone who says otherwise is a doggawn liar, I say. Fix one thing, and two things over yonder break. Fix those
and the first thing broke in a new way. Around the Merry-Go-Round we go. However, on each pass, fewer things break than the last time, and
more things look right on the site. So that's progress, of sorts. Kinda three steps forward one step back, progress, but ok, I'll take it.
At some point, though, it seems apparent that the UI will need to be redone from scratch. I tried too many different ways of doing things
to try them out, and some stuck, while others fell by the wayside. Now, things in HTMLland are a bit more chaotic than I'd like. So an
overhaul that simplifies it all and settles on one way to do things is in order. Fo shizzle. Scribbling that into the project plan. It'll happen
at some point. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
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Feb 3, 2021
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More CSS - Updates
More consolidation and tightening up of the CSS. Round 2. Jiggling stuff into place on various pages. A bit tedious, but... the improvements
in Look & Feel are worth the effort. Eventually, though, the entire site will require a major UI overhaul. Pretty sure.
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Feb 1, 2021
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CSS - Update
More consolidation and tightening up of the CSS. This can not be done in one round. It requires a certain amount of experimentation,
fiddling, and jiggling things into place. CSS is like that. But as I move forward things are improving (when they aren't breaking).
Woot-n-stuff.
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Jan 25, 2021
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Group Equipment Page - Bug Fix
The Group Equipment Page that allows the GM to switch Weapons and Armors being used by Characters in adventure groups had a minor bug in that
it was not updated for the new Energy Armors configuration, and so this was causing the page to fail to load. Fixed now. :)
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CSS Themes Update
Further consolidation on the CSS for Themes building. Going well. There's still more to do, but the incremental updates are improving things as
I move along. I think one or two more passes and I will have a solid and easily updatable system for working with themes. Of course, as those
who work with CSS know, it can be a bit daunting, sometimes confusing, and occassionally positively perplexing stuff. CSS. But progress is
definitely being made. Onward ho.
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Jan 3, 2021
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World Print - Update
The World printout shows the Author of the world, saying "... By [author's name]", which is nice. Howver, in the case
of shared worlds it was only showing the world founder's name, and not the co-authors. That has been fixed and it now will
show all the shared world author's names. As it should, of course.
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World Image - Enhancement
When a Player goes to view "About this World" the text they would see when first entering the form shows the description of
the world, and then if there is an image for the world in the top level Place then it shows that as well. However, now it
will show the World's Cover Image above the text description, but only when the player selects to the top level place (which
is the default when they enter the form). It looks nice, and encourages World authors to have neat looking cover images.
Which they should, of course. The cover image also is shown with 0% blur, unlike the other images that get displayed from
the world. This is done for the other images to help obscure text that the GM might not want their players to be able to read
such as names on maps, and such. The blur simply helps to obscure smaller text. And gives the images a bit of a dreamy
quality. Anyway, it's a bit of a nice touch I think.
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Dec 31, 2020
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Printout Pages Session Timeout - Bug Fix
And so, as it happens there are a couple of pages in the Mythos Machine that do printouts so that the documents can be easily printed,
either on paper, or to PDF. However, I noticed that if I leave those pages up for more than 11 minutes or so, then when I click the
Return button the application would fly back to the login page. When I log back in I would have to climb back to the place I was and
resume work. This only happened when I left the page sitting in the browser for too long. So it was a session timeout. To fix this
was easy. I applied the KeepAlive method. And now, it is working as intended. You can sit on the page for quite a long time, days perhaps,
without a timeout. Lovely. Happy New Years. :D
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Dec 27, 2020
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Character Armor Listing - Bug Fix
I had changed the order of the Armors so that the ACMs (Armor Class Mod) for Physical and Energy stack together, and the same for
the DAB (Damage Absorption), however, I overlooked one of the three cases, and so the values were not displaying in the
correct column in those cases. Fixed. :)
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Dec 17, 2020
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Character Page - Style Enhancements
A series of style improvements on the Character page were made to help improve the Look & Feel.
Especially in the case were the Allocation option is being used, though in a variety of other places as well.
Most notably, the Armor table now groups the Armor Stats in a way that is easier to read, and with
better definition in the Column Headers for ease of understanding by new GMs and Players.
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Error Handling - Update
A better method of error handling has been implemented, which should improve application usage,
and provide a better user experience. However, that said, we may need / want to revisit this
again for further improvement / consolidation.
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Dec 5 to 14, 2020
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Worlds Development
This period has been spent on developing a Shared One Shot Sci-Fi / Space Opera with the
fabulously talented and well organized CrimsonScorpio. The World's Things have been expertly
rationalized, and it represents a major advancement for Elthos RPG World Templates. Nice Job
CrimsonScorpio! Future generations of GMs and Players have good reason to thank you.
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Dec 3, 2020
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User Glide Path Streamlining - Enhancement
A couple of my long suffering play tester friends mentioned (for the umpteenth time) that
there are too many clicks when going into the application to get where they typically want
to go. Ok, fine fine. I finally got around to asking them for specific suggestions, and
boy were they forthcoming! So great! So now, you no longer get a popup screen with verbiage
about the site status or links to the Beta-Test Site when you get to Mythos Machine.
And you no longer have to click the "Login" button to bring up the Login Dialog box,
and then click OK to login. Now you can just go to the top navigation bar and there are
your user name and password textboxes, with login button next to them. It is also set so
if you type your name and password you can click the Enter key and it will log you in.
After that if you are a player you go immediately to the Player Intel screen so you can
select which world and character you want to work on, rather than going through the Player
Admin Console. If you are a Gamesmaster then it brings you to the GM Admin Console so you
can decide which World / Characters / Things you want to work on. If you want to switch worlds
from there then you can go from there to the Worlds page and change to any of your other worlds.
What is skipped by both is a first top at the Mythos Machine Home Page, but you can always
get there from the Admin Consoles no problem if you want to check out updates to the Site
Information. Not bad for a day's work. Hungry. Getting lunch. :)
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Nov 30, 2020
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Shared Worlds - Campaign & Adventure Handling - Update
Not quite a bug, but almost. When you have a Shared World with another GM (or more than one)
whatever Places you own will have Campaigns and Adventures. The other GMs of the World can
read those, but they should not be able to modify them. That was not quite working. But
now it is. Good good.
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Nov 29, 2020
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Feedback Emails - Enhancement
The Emails that Elthos Admin recieves when users send in their feedback did not have
anything other than the description, such as the play mode of the players at the time,
nor the page that they were sending the feedback from. Now we are getting all the
information in the email, which saves the Admin (that would be me, folks) from having
to then go to the database to look that information up. More streamlined is better,
faster, strong. :)
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Nov 27, 2020
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Mobile MM
There was a problem with the Mythos Machine if you were trying to use it on certain pages with your phone.
It couldn't scroll to the right if the screen was wider than the device... so for example on the Manage Places page,
you could see stuff, and type text, but you couldn't get to the Save button. Now, at least on Chrome, you can.
Which is good. Because I like to be able to update ideas I have sometimes when I'm out and about. Now I can. And so
can you. Woot!
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Nov 22, 2020
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Record Adventures - Enhancement
The Record Adventures Page provides a quick way for the GM to hop around their World's structure
to find Campaigns, Adventures and Events of interest to them, and then go to them on their
respective pages. The form wasn't behaving entirely well, as some buttons were grayed out where
they needn't be, and in addition clicking on the Go To Events button caused an error if there
did not happen to be an event already created. These issues have all be resolved. Much better.
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Character Page - Update
A few minor but helpful enhancements to the UI.
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Nov 21, 2020
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Adventure Group Page - Bug Fix
I went to fix some CSS stuff a while back and one page wound up with two class definitions for the same
button, causing the page to fail to load. Ahaha. Yep. This kind of thing is not impossible. Fortunately
it is also super easy to fix. Done. Yay. Back to other fish.
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Nov 20, 2020
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GM Character Leveling - Bug Fix
There was a fairly insideous error in the data of one of the Proto-Worlds that was left over from a
distant issue of the past, already long forgotten, that actually showed up in a wierd way. In some cases
new worlds based on that Proto-World would wind up having a few characters who could not be Leveled up
by the GM in the Characters form. No error would show, but the Character would simply keep the same level they
had before the attempt to upgrade them. Digging carefully through the data revealed the source of the problem
as well as what coding change was required to avoid it going forward. So both data and code were updated to
fix this little bug. Sorry about that CrimsonScorpio. You're good to go now!
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Nov 15, 2020
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Stores Handling on Chraracter Armor, Equipment and Weapons pages - Enhancement
Before when you switched to a different store in any of the three pages, and then went to
one of the others (so from Armor to Equipment, let's say), then you would have to reselect the
store you had picked on the previous page. Now, when you select a store it remains the selected
store on the other pages as well. I also moved the buttons to the same line as the store selector
drop-down box to visually indicate that there is a relationship between the store you pick and the
other pages.
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Armor Creation - Update
A minor issue, and not quite a bug as it didn't produce any errors, but in the database the
Armor Cateogry should read "P" for "Physical", "E" for "Energy". That has been updated so now the
database will have consistant entries for that field.
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Armor Bulk Edit - Bug Fix
A pretty major issue as the form wasn't working and throwing an error. Fortunately the problem
was a reasonably simple oversite on my part, and easy enough to fix after review. Done. Working
correctly now. You are safe to Bulk Edit your Armors again. Go.
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Nov 14, 2020
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Character Weapons Page - Update
We noticed that the Attack Level Modifier was missing from the stats on the Character Weapons Page,
so I went ahead and added that, as for keen eye'd players it does make a difference to know that little
bit of info.
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Nov 3, 2020
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Dice Roller - Update
The Dice Roller sub routine has been improved with better code.
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Store Inventory Management - Enhancement
Store Inventory Management has always been a bit of a bear, and needed a separate page in order
to make it more convenient for GMs to manage what Weapons, Armors and Equipement are in each
store. This is now improved with a new page that makes it much easier to add and remove items
from each Store.
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Oct 20, 2020 to Nov 2, 2020
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CSS Overhaul - Phase IIc - Update
Continuing on the long and arduous road of my CSS Overhaul. It has been a hugely informative study, and I now have a much greater
understanding of the various capabilities of CSS, and therefore many more options, and a much better configuration. The work is not
entirely completed yet, but I've made such good progress that I'm up to releasing the current changes from the Test server to the
Production server, which is good news. The site does not look that much different, and I'd be surprised if anyone happens to detect
where the current crop of visual changes are (though some more persistent users will notice, I think). Still though, the point is
not to change the look and feel, yet. But to make my ability to do so much more coherent. And yes, I know, this is taking crazy
long to do. I understand. But again, Ethos is my art form. Don't rush me. I'm a slow-poke, I know. Thanks again for your
patience.
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Oct 13, 2020 to Oct 20, 2020
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CSS Overhaul - Phase IIb - Update
More solid progress on the CSS overhaul. Having worked out the general patterns for CSS and how I think now is the best approach for future maintenance
and extensibility, I am going through each of the CSS Class categories and consolidating, refining, and simplifying. This is a LOT of back end work.
At this point long time users will begin to notice certain style changes where there may have been some slight differences in objects that might not
have seemed to need them. These were due to different (and often semi-experimental) styles being applied via a plethora of classes that became something
of a jumbled heap after a while. These all are being consolidated. There's still a lot more work to be done but progress is steady and if I might say so,
a bit on the tedious side. But it must be done, so I am doing it. Also note: for those who may be mystified why this operation is taking so long,
remember folks, I'm a one man team, with a day job working for a hospital IT Department. I am also assistant instructor at a Wudan Internal Martial Arts
School, and am in training to be a regular in structure going into 2021. Hence, I really don't have a lot of free time per week. Seriously. The fact that
the project makes the amazing amount of progress it does is due solely to the sheer force of my determination to create this, use it for my own fabulous
games, and offer it to the world in a form that I feel will be both useful, fun to play with, and attractive to look at. Ethos is my art form. Don't
rush me. I'm a slow-poke, I know. Thank you.
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Sep 25, 2020 to Oct 12, 2020
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CSS Overhaul - Phase IIa - Update
The CSS overhaul is moving steadily along. Quite a lot of R&D has been going on behind the scenes and the site is being updated periodically with new CSS revisions. You will NOT see any changes during this process, which is the goal. Nothing visually to the user should change, except for a few consolidations of style where during the course of the review they appear desirable. So far, no changes. However, on the backend - everything is changing, simplifying and becoming far more coherent and maintainable. Which is a very good thing. So work is being done, and lots of it, though you can't see it. In the end, however, it will definitely be a major improvement as I plan to offer users the ability to theme their worlds with different looks & feels based on genre. Which will be very cool. And the site will be a lot more coherent. Also a huge plus for the project. Ok. Back to the salt mine here.
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Sep 14, 2020 to Sep 24, 2020
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CSS Overhaul - Phase I - Update
Ok. Whew. Damn. That was a LOT of very inglorious and super unsexy work that went on over the past two weeks. Which is why you haven't heard anything from me about Mythos Machine for a while. But damn if what the site can do now, and going forward, isn't going to be remarkably more coherent in terms of the UI. I began the long awaited process of clarifying, consolidating, simplifying, and refactoring the CSS for the site. Yes... it is that unsexy. I know.
But still, what this will allow me to do in the future is pretty fantastic from a code maintenance perspective... which in turn means from the user perspective, though you won't at all know why it's so much better than it was. Only I will know. But ok... cutting back to the chase. I will be able to much more easily create themes for the site which will basically allow you to choose your preferred site look for your worlds. And once I have a handful of diverse and interesting themes, I will then work on the next step, which is to allow you, the user, to create your own themes for your worlds, including images. And that, I honestly think, is going to be very cool. And site maintenance for me is going to be quite a bit easier, as now I have finally found out about, and implemented CSS Custom Properties, which means that I can (and do) have one and only one structure file, in which all of the colors of the site are variables, and then I have in each theme folder a single small file of colors for those variables. The colors can be linear gradients, shades and shadows, and the whole nine yards. Which means to create your own themes you need only select your colors, load a handful of images that fit your idea, and ... voila... your world can have its own unique look, designed by you.
But (of course there's a but), it will take me another big effort to do the next preliminary step so I can do all of that more elegantly. I now want to go through the CSS and consolidate the classes and rationalize them. At the moment they are still a bit of a mixed bag, with some being names according to their function (like FormTitle), while others are named simply by their color (like BG_Red). I want a nice simplified list so that when I present an interface with the color options, they make sense to the users and aren't confusing. Right now, there are simply too many selections. So ... another big push and I should get to the next plateau, and from there I can go places and do things. I'm excited about this. I've been wanting to get to this for a very long time... but back end coding, calculations and data presentation (ie - Functionality) comes first. Always. Second comes Look & Feel. Which finally, after a long long slog, I'm up to. Which is mighty sweet.
Ok, I'll keep posting on progress. Nothing you will see visibly has been changed at this point. But the back end has taken a huge albiet invisible leap forward. Woot!
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Aug 29 to Sep 13, 2020
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UI Overhaul R&D
When I first started working on Mythos Machine it was a very long time ago, and many technologies that we take for granted today simply didn't exist, yet. So there's a certain percentage of the project that requires an overhaul to modernize it at any given time. Since it is a rather large project with lots of aspects (world creation, play testing, programming, interface design, marketing, business operations, etc) and I'm only one person working on it in my (rather scanty) spare time, I can only make so much progress on it in any given week/month/year. That's life. At any rate, for the past two weeks or so I have begun working on the arduous and thorny problem of the UI overhaul. When I started creating MM CSS was pretty a lot less robust than it is now, and at that time Table Oriented Design was still considered a pretty reasonable option. In some small circles, actually, it still is. There's pros and cons to every technology, and each one solves a set of problems, and yet, since nothing is perfect, has its own set of problems. At any rate I began doing R&D on CSS with a focus on CSS Grid and CSS Flexbox. These in combination, my hope was, would make the site more responsive, and fix a long standing issue I've had: the heights of elements within their containers has not always been consistent, and although I have dabbled at fixes a number of times in the past, and failed to find one that would work across the board, I wound up with a lot of hard coded Height elements all over the place, both in the CSS and in the inline-styles of a large number of pages. This is bad. It makes the interface brittle. And it's also bad because it's very difficult to get an exact alignment along the bottoms of text boxes, and listboxes by using hard coded heights. It works. But only sort of. And it winds up looking, in the end, unprofessional and messy. So now I wanted to work out... how DO you do this seemingly obvious and simple thing in CSS? Finally, after many years. I'm still working on it, actually, but as of today, I THINK, I have found out the missing piece of my puzzle. I don't know how well it will work across the board, yet, nor how many changes I may need to make to how many elements in the many pages with hard coded Heights to get it to work everywhere, or if the method I'm using now will just magically fix the issue everywhere in one fell swoop. Working on it. So far, it looks promising... after many disappointments these past two weeks, that's a welcome relief. Of course, I'm still holding my breath because I am quite accustomed to finding myself 95% of the way to a solution, only to find out at the last turn that Nope... that dog don't hunt neither, no how, after all. But at this point I am very cautiously optimistic that maybe I've got something. Working on it. Crossing fingers.
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Aug 20, 2020
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Print World Images - Bug Fix
In some cases, if the World did not have an image or a map associated to an Adventure, Mythos Machine would generate an error instead of skipping over it. This would cause the screen to come up with a black background and no world print. It was a rare occurrence, but no matter ... it's been fixed. Now it is working much better, even in those cases. Still though if you can add an image or a map to your Adventures, I do recommend it. :)
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Aug 19, 2020
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Print World Handsomeness - Enhancements
I've been working a lot on the print world feature as I want to now start creating Adventure modules to load up to DriveThru RPG. The printing has gotten a lot cleaner, and more elegant. Lots of nuanced changes there... too many to list, but it's a lot nicer now. Especially the print to PDF. Very cool. Learned a lot. :)
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Aug 12, 2020
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New Print From Tree Top Down Option - Enhancement
Earlier, the way the Print World feature worked was that you would select a Place in your
Places tree at whatever level of the tree you wanted a printout about, and Mythos Machine would
dutifully print from that Place down.
So, if you started with this tree:
Place 1
Place 2
Place 3
Place 4
Place 5
Place 6 < SELECTED PLACE
Place 7
Place 8
Place 9
Place 10
Place 11
Place 12
Place 13
Place 14
Place 15
Place 16
Mythos Machine would print this:
Place 6 < SELECTED PLACE
Place 7
Place 8
Place 9
Place 10
Place 11
Place 12
However, it became clear to me that this is great if you are GMing and you only need a printout of
the current Place and its Campaigns and Adventures, and really didn't need anything from the higher
levels of the tree because you already know that part, and you just want to print as few pages as
necessary for your game. However, if you are an Author-GM and you want to print out a section
of your World from other GMs, perhaps, to play with, then you very well might want to have it
print from the top of the tree down to your selected place, and then every place below that.
So in this case it would print this (notice it is including the top level [1] and the next level [5]
which it wasn't doing before, while still leaving out everything in the side branches you didn't select):
Place 1
Place 5
Place 6 < SELECTED PLACE
Place 7
Place 8
Place 9
Place 10
Place 11
Place 12
Well, glory be, now Mythos Machine gives you the option to print either way, so you can print from the
top of the tree down, or just from your selected place down. Your choice. Sweetness.
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Jul 31, 2020
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Show Levels & Classes - Enhancement
Ok, one of those trick issues came up recently. One of the GMs on the team, good old CrimsonScorpio
wanted to let his Players see Skills that are either beyond their Character's Level or outside of their
Class. Now by default Players can only see Skills that are their current Character Level or below,
and of their selected Class... this is to help to focus on what is currently available to their Characters,
and avoid confusion. It also allows the GM to hide Skills that are above the Character Level and outside
their Class so they can spring surprise Skills on them, or they can get the "Wow" effect when they advance
to their next level. There's some merit to that.
On the other hand there's also a reasonable argument for letting the players see ahead and outside their box
so they can plan their character builds and so on. However, it was kind of a one or the other proposition.
So, to solve this I have added a World Configuration option to allow the GM to decide on a per World basis
if they want their Players to see the checkboxes that allow them to view Skills outside the box, or not.
The GM can choose to either allow them to see Skills of all Levels, or choose to let them see beyond their
Class, or both, or neither. It's now entirely up to the GM. Took some effort to get that to work, but
it's worth it.
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Backend Refactoring - Enhancement
Not sexy stuff. But I did a bunch of backend refactoring of the code in order to centralize configuration
routines that were making things more complicationed than necessary. Cleaner is gooder.
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Jul 18, 2020
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Currently Working On - Skill Categories - Enhancement
Previously Skills had a set of categories that are used by the Gameaster to help organize their Skill Books
by letting them filter on Skill according to their category before adding them to books. This is handy.
Categories include this list
| Academic |
| Agrarian |
| Artistic |
| Athletic |
| Combat |
| Craft |
| Domestic |
| Feats |
| General |
| Kung Fu Armors |
| Kung Fu Weapons |
| Medical |
| Mesmerism |
| Psychic |
| Spirit |
| Technical |
| Thieving |
However, as I am working on new kinds of worlds recently I have noticed that the categories I created
originally don't quite fit into all worlds (kind of obviously now), and so I decided to add a Skills Category
feature that allows the GM to create and modify the Skills Category List for each of their Worlds individually.
Ahhhh... that's the ticket. Makes sense. And now it parallels what I already had for Mystic Power Categories
that lets you do the same. So now, if you have a Sci-Fi World and want to mix up the Categories with all
kinds of high tech skill groupings, you easily can. The feature also alerts you to skills still associated
to a given category if you go to delete it, so that you can adjust those skills accordingly. Works nicely! :)
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Jul 3, 2020
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Webhooks - Bug Fix
As it happens, the recent update to the Shared Worlds introduced a bug that caused the Stripe Webhooks to fail.
I thought I was doing the right thing by adding a redirect to the default page if anything should go wrong,
but I didn't know that Stripe counts that as a webhook failure, whether you did it intentioinally or not,
and so the webhooks began failing. It took a week for me to realize that was why, and fix it. Ok,
not a biggie. Webhooks are working correctly now.
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Jun 30, 2020
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Stores - Bug Fix
There was a check being conducted on Stores when a GM on the World Management page would click the
Worlds drop-down list. This check would look to see if there are both "Body Things" and "The General Store" and
if either are missing, create them dynamically and populate them. However, this check is no longer necessary,
and in some cases I found it erroneously created duplicate stores for both. So I have commented it out and
this should no longer bother anyone.
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Jun 29, 2020
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Elthos Forum - Bug Fix
After migrating to the new server by the hosting company certain configuration options on the Elthos Forum (YAF)
caused issues where new users could not register their accounts. These issues have been fixed, and the Forum
is now operating normally again. In addition I added a link from the Mythos Machine "Contacts" drop-down to the
Forum, which wasn't there earlier, thus providing easier access to it for Mythos Machine users.
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Jun 25, 2020
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Shared Worlds - Update
I am working on a Shared World with CrimsonScorpio. This is my first attempt at actually using a Shared World so
I know there will be some rough edges to smooth out. The first one I ran into is that the owner of the World should
be able to set the privacy level of areas within the World. I think. I have to go over this again and really determine
if that's the case or not, as I went through some effort originially to prohibit it. And I need to go back over
my notes to find out why. In the meantime, though, I decided to undo that particular prohibiition and I want to
see how that works. For now I think it affords me some greater flexibility with the World and what the Players can see.
So this is a tentative update and may even be reversed. But for now owners of Shared Worlds can update the Privacy Level
of the places in their world.
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Jun 23, 2020
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Session Loss Handling - Enhancement
ASP.Net uses Session State to manage objects between pages. It's all well and good, until you time out the session
by not being active on the site while reviewing your World Printout. Ok no problem. Wherease before the condition caused
and ungraceful error... now it just pops you back through the home page, and resets your session. You do have to
come back into the Mythos Machine and get back to where you were, but that's about as graceful as session loss is likely
to get. At least until I find an even better way to handle it. Which could happen. Don't be too surprised if I
update this again at some point. I've been at this for a while, and I'm still learning new things about it.
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Jun 19, 2020
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Character Generation - Update
As a further refinement of the previous update, there is now a distinction between Allocation Worlds and
Random Generation Worlds that makes more sense. Since in Allocation Worlds the player will examine the
Race Class options before deciding on the Race and Class they want to lock in for the Character, and
before that their Requisites are unsaved at zeros, the code now accommodates that fact, and shows only
the Classes that are assigned to the currently selected Race. We also remove the "Show Only Classes
that Fit the Character" checkbox for Allocation Worlds since their requisites are 0, and therefore this
check doesn't influence the selection options. Conversely, for the Random Roll worlds the opposite is the case. This is a better arrangement for the Players and now accommodates both styles of World Character Generation.
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Jun 7, 2020
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Character Generation - Update
Once again CrimsonScorpio to the rescue of yet another Mythos Machine feature! This time he noticed that
when his players using Allocation had not yet decided what Race to be, they could not examine the classes
available to the unselected Races, and so they had to fly blind on that before making their selection.
This is not a good thing. And so it's been fixed, and now players can review all available classes
before selecting their Race when generating characters in an Allocation World. Thank you CrimsonScorpio.
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Jun 2, 2020
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Administrative Functions
Just a few things on the back end that are helpful to me as the Administrator of Mythos Machine. Sort orders
and the like. Nothing you'd notice, but they make life easier for yours truly just the same. :)
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May 26, 2020
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More Data Governance - Update
Yep. More of that non-Sexy stuff that no one but me will ever know about. Ah well... it must be done,
so it is being done. I caught a few more issues that were very backend and invisible to the users, but
nevertheless were creating some stale data. No one likes stale data, folks. Least of all yours truly.
Fixed. Probably a few more spots to scrub clean, too. Checking.
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May 25, 2020
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Backend Data Governance - Updates
Will you believe me if I tell you that this is NOT sexy work? You will never see a difference in the Mythos Machine
if I do this work or not. But it is necessary as it saves you from seeing oddball data-bugs, and saves me the
embarassment and hassle of having to hunt them down later and squash them. So ... there you have it. Invisible
improvements on the back end. Woot.
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New World Things Duplicates Report - Enhancement
Ok, this was something that I implemented as a front end check when you Clone your World. It would show you
where in your Things you may have Duplicate Names... such as "Book of Elven Magic". You really shouldn't ever
have Duplicate names for such things, so this report helps you to find them, and fix that. Works nicely. You
get to it from the World Info Page.
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Character Level Change drop-down - Bug Fix
Well, this was a bug that got introduced on May 23 when I inadvertently forgot to do a check on a particular
loop in the code. That created an extra record in the Adventures table, which didn't belong there. This caused
a problem when the GM would try to update the Character Level from the Character Page. Well, that was a long and
winding road to chase that bug down, but don't worry. GM's can rest assured. I got it.
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May 23, 2020
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New Guild Class - Bug Fig
This was a bug alrighty. It took a while for me to track down what was going on, but in the end it turned out to be
that when you added a new Guild Class, the program would add the wrong class to the Race_GuildClass cross reference table,
whichever was the first Guild Class in the Gridview on the left. So, having tracked the bug down, it has been squashed.
Good bye bug.
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May 18, 2020
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World Copy - Update
Not quite a bug, but pretty darn close to it. I was missing a slice of world information during the copy,
namely the Skill Book Race combinations. That's been fixed now. Whew. Pretty important stuff that. :p
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May 17, 2020
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New Player Character Gen - Enhancement
The new system for providing a more effective Glide Path (aka onboarding) new players automatically
added the new player to the Fantasy_Gen World so they can test out character generation and world exploration.
One of my play testers, Donovan the Great, suggested allowing them to select among a number of Genre specific
Worlds so that new players don't get incorrect the impression that Mythos Machine only supports Fantasy Worlds.
That would be oh so very wrong. So now you can select any of a number of genre specific worlds to roll
new characters in, starting with Fantasy, Wild West, Bushido and Sci-Fi. That should do the trick.
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May 16, 2020
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Character Screen - Enhancement
Each Character is of a Race, Class and Culture. But that information was a bit cubby-holed away from
the Character Screen and you had to go hunt for it to see it. Now, instead, all of that information is
shown directly on the Character Page (and optionally printable in the Character Printout). This makes it
much easier for the GM and Player to get a full picture of the Character in one spot. A definite improvement.
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May 13, 2020
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Print World - Updates
A pretty fabulous backend change that you won't notice at all, but makes me happy, was the consolidation of World Place Information and
Sub Place Information beneath the top level of the World. That section had a huge swath of duplicate code that was always a bear to deal with
and make any changes to. Today - it tis no more! No duplicate code, my friends. No duplicate code. I'm a happy man.
In related news, the GM World Notes now appears at the top of the World Print, so GMs can write up whatever they want future GMs of their
Worlds to understand about how to GM the wondrous thing. This is a better placement than at the bottom, I am assured by my fellow
GMs using the system. I do agree.
I have also modifed the color scheme for the Printouts to make the colors more uniform, and a bit lighter so that the text remains
easy to read, but with colors that help the GM find what they are looking for more easily. I may futz with the colors a bit more over time
but not by much. I think it feels quite good as it is.
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Character Print - Bug Fix
If you had a character with only one armor, then there was a bug that would cause a problem printing the Character. While I was at it
I also fixed the formating of the Armors section in the printout and now it is a bit more uniform and looks a little nicer. I like. :)
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May 10, 2020
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World Print - Update
A minor improvement to the World Print, but still, it's makes a difference. Before when printing from HTML to PDF
the Stat Blocks Tables would be too wide for the font and cause wrapping within the table cells. That's been fixed
and now it's a cleaner print to PDF. This should make it easier for GMs to Print their Worlds from the Mythos Machine
directly to PDF for convenient Upload to their favorite content sharing sites.
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May 9, 2020
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Create Worlds - Enhancement
Earlier when you create a world, it would make a copy of the original for you, and include Places,
Campaigns, and Adventures... but not Events. The thinking was at the time that Events would be
used by GMs to record what happened during their own personal games. However, one World Author,
Alex Donovan, had recorded Events which are part of the Adventure setup. Which is a good idea, and
something I've done on occassion as well. Later he generously offered to allow me to use his "A Strange World"
as a Proto-World, but of course it didn't copy the Events. After this I realized the system should copy Events
in any case. Personal Worlds will probably not be copied, or if they are the GM probably would want the
Events. Maybe even the Experience Gains, too, come to think of it. And for Proto-Worlds and MarketPlace
Worlds the Events, if there are any, are going to be part of the World setup. So yeah... now that I think it
over, yep ... the Events should be copied to the new World either way. Durh. Anyway, now they are.
I may go ahead and also copy the Experience Gains as well, on the same grounds. Thinking ...
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Apr 29, 2020
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World Things Validation - Enhancement
When you want to create a copy of your World the system will look at the names of all the Things (weapons, armors, races,
classes, etc) and use those to create the new things in the copied World. However, there's a problem when you have
Things with the same exact names. So now, before the system will create a copy of the World it checks first to
see if you have Duplicate Names, and let's you know, so you can fix that. Really, everything in your world should
have a unique name. This duplicate names validation is very helpful for ensuring that the World is nice and clean
and tidy before making copies of it. This is particularly important, I think, for Marketplace Worlds... which should be as clean and correct as possible.
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Apr 23, 2020
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Player World Invitation Request Method - Enhancement
The method for GMs to accept Requests by Players to join their Worlds was klunky as all get-out. The GM
would get the request in their email they would see this:
To Invite this Player to your World you can log onto the Mythos Machine, go to the requested World, hover
over The 'Go To...' button, and select 'Invite Player', which will show you the list of available players.
Click the checkbox next to their name, and then click the 'Send Invites' button. The Player will then
recieve an email and be able to Join your World by clicking the Link. This will bring them to your
World's Generate Character Screen, and they can begin creating their first Character! Have fun!
Nope. Not fun. Soooo... to make this process MUCH SMOOTHER for the GM, the email now comes with a bright and
shining Blue Button that says "Click to Accept the Request". And when the GM clicks the button it automagically
adds the player to their world, and sends the Player an email letting them know. Oh so much sweeter! Ok. That's good
for today. :)
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Apr 21, 2020
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Character Armors, Weapons & Equipment - Bug Fixes
When going into the Character Armors page, the Armors that the Character has already bought were not
showing up in the list. That's not good. Fixed.
I also noticed while I was fixing this issue that the General Store was not being selected as the default
Store when entering the three pages, but it should have been. Now it does. Yep. Better.
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Manage Adventure Groups - Bug Fix
On the Manage Adventure Group screen there's a little checkbox that reads "Show PC Adventre Groups Only".
Nice idea, but it stopped working when I added the new "World_Players" table system. I got a little
too fancy with the thing and borked it up. Ok. That's been fixed. Yay. :)
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Character Skills List - Enhancement
In the Character Skills page, where Players can select the Skills that their Character has learned,
it was filtering the list so that as you added skills the list would shrink and only show what you
still can select from. So as you use up Skill Learning Points to acquire skills the list
would shring, and when you used up all your Character's SLP no skills would show up in the list.
Howver, the page worked differently for Elected Skills, where it would continue to show you the list
of Skills, even after you used up the SLP. When you clicked a Skill that costs more SLP than the
Character has left, it would show you a pink highlighted note saying "Too Expensive, not enough SLP".
Between the two, the latter seems a better way to do it. So that's been changed and now both lists
lists work the same way.
As an aside, the list does not show Skills above the Character's Level, however. This is so that the
GM has a chance to spring suprises on the Players with Skills that they have not yet had the chance
to review... you know, like just in case the higher Level Villains want to surprise them with some
unusual Skill above their ken. Just like in those old Kung Fu Shaw Brother movies! Fun! :)
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Character - Player Change - Bug Fix
The GM may upon occassion wish to take over a Player Character for one reason or another. Perhaps
the Player can't make the game that night and the GM wants to assign the Character to themselves (or
another Player in the group). There's a drop-down list on the Characters Page that lets the GM
change the Player, but it didn't save the change. Now it does. Whew.
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New Players get Fantasy Gen World - Enhancement
When a New Player comes into Mythos Machine for the first time they can elect to try out Generating
New Characters to see how things work. To do this they join the Fantasy Gen World. However, once
they are done with that the Fantasy Gen world could not be seen again the next time they log in.
However, it seems better to leave it available to them in case they want to poke around a bit and
try it again. They can always remove themselves from it by clicking the "Depart This World" button
when they no longer wish to see it in their list of Joined Worlds.
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Gen Character - New Player View - Enhancement
When coming into the Character Generation Screen for the first time a new Player would see the
Transfer Things button. But there is nothing for them to transfer yet, as they do not have
any Characters yet. The button now does not show until a Character is generated.
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Apr 20, 2020
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Player Invites - Bug Fix
Player Invites to your World is a really essential feature. But it's one I don't have the ability to test easily
due to limitations on my end. So, I made a mistake and didn't catch it. The mistake was really difficult for me
to notice, or figure out. But the effect was that when a GM invited more than one Player at a time to their World,
each Player would get the email, but when they clicked the link it wouldn't add them to the World. Only the
first player in the list was being added. But why?? I figured it out.
There was an &= at the start of the email body text in the loop ... so the emails were stacking ...
if you looked at the last one it would have each of the earlier ones stacked in the email.
That &= needed to be just =. One character error and poof. Site's a mess. How about that?
Coding ain't for the faint of heart, bro. - FIXED. Damn.
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Apr 19, 2020
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New Player Character - Update
When going into the Character Page for the first time in a given World, the "Transfer Things" button
was visible before the first character has been created. This didn't do any harm, but presented a point
of confusiong as the player had nothing to transfer yet, having no Character. That has been fixed and now
the button does not show up until after a character has been created.
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Apr 18, 2020
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New Player Glide Path - Enhancement
For a long time I've been trying to figure out ways to help new Players get oriented with the Mythos Machine
as quickly and easily as possible. Recently a friend of mine mentioned that I might take the new Player directly
into a Kick-Around World so that they can generate new Characters and try the World Information page to see
the basics of what Players can do with the thing. Splendid idea!
After a batch of trial and error with creating this I know have a smoothly working version which I've tested out
here and am pretty happy with. When a New Player joins up with their free account, MM takes them to the Main Screen
and brings up a dialog box that lets them choose to
a) Generate a Character in the Fantasy_Gen World (created
specifically for the purpose of letting players out generating Characters), or
b) go to the World Info page where they can explore the World of Fantasy Gen, or
c) go straight to the Player Info page where they can search for
their GM and the World they want to join. For the first and second options the Player can go back and forth at
their leisure, and once they pick the third option then the Guide finishes, and they can continue on their merry
way with MM.
So far it seems to work nicely, and will only come up the the first time the new Player logs into the system.
I think this will definitely help new Players to see what Mythos Machine does for them right off the bat. There's
certainly a lot more to do in terms of creating a proper Glide Path for new Members, but I'm very sure that this
is a step in the right direction, and will help a lot. :)
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Apr 13, 2020
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World Things Holes Report - Update
The World Things Holes Report had one problem. When you clicked the button to go to the report it would
by default run the report without a filter. This caused the page to take a very long time to load. So
I added a "Run Report" button, and now the page loads fast, and you can then select your filters before
running the report. Much better.
I also added a button to the report from the Admin Things Console so that you can get to it quickly from
there. Every improvement helps, believe me.
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Apr 11, 2020
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Apr 10, 2020
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Character Page - Update
To reduce the visual complexity I split the description of the Race and the Class into two seperate lines
with the Select Race and Select Class buttons between them. This is a distinct improvement. I also added
a tooltip to the Descriptive Details button that will help people understand what it's for without having
to click on it to find out. Ok. Polishing things.
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Apr 8, 2020
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Manage Players - Player Mode - Selections - Bug Fix
There was a problem with the way the page would handle changing between a Joined World and selecting a World of
a GM to Join. It would not deselect the other list and so it was not possible to get back to the previous list
and display the information without exiting the page and coming back in again if there was only one item in the list.
Fixed. :)
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Manage Players - Player Mode - Characters List - Update
The Character's list was sorting by World and then Charater Name, while showing the Adventure Group of the Character.
So the Characters were not sorting together in the list by Group, which would make things a little easier for the Player.
That has been changed and now they sort by World, Adventure Group, then Character Name. Better.
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Manage Players - Player Mode - Select GM - Update
Some of the GMs in the list were showing up, even though there were no Worlds that the player had not already
joined for that GM. We are not excluding those GMs from the list because there is no reason for them to be
there unless the Player has yet to join one or more of their Worlds. Makes things clearer and eliminates that
bit of confusion there. Yep. Good.
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Apr 7, 2020
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User Interface Elements - Update
Some of the elements such as labels that present dynamic data on the pages was not styled in a very
attractive way, and gave no visual clue that they ought to be noticed. The pages that use these elements
will not present them in a more stylish manner. It helps. Believe me.
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Places and Campaigns CSS - Update
At lower screen resolutions than I use here, such 1366x786, the controls on the page didn't display correctly.
Now it's a bit better. I will need to go through every page at the lower resolutions and see if there are other
similar issues to resolve. In most cases it is a matter of trying to stuff too many elements for that resolution
on the same line. Ok. Lesson learned.
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Admin Email - Bug Fix
I recently wanted to change the method for sending out emails to simplify the code. Unfortunately, this caused
a side issue when sending out Admin Emails to let the Administrator (me) know when certain events happen on the
system, such as a new user sign up. Durh. Fixed. Ok. The problem though, is that this was causing an
issue with users sending Invite Requests to GMs. So that's fixed too. Whew.
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Apr, 6 2020
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Worlds Management - Bug Fix
When the Player becomes a GM and goes to the Worlds Page for the first time, some World buttons were enabled before the
World has been created. This should not be. And now it isn't.
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Player Management - Updates
When the Player becomes a GM and returns to the Player Management Page the On / Off colors of the GM / Player Options
was not showing up. This has been fixed.
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Apr 5, 2020
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Stripe Programming - Trial Period - Bug Fix
There was a minor oversight with the deployment of the new Trail Period feature in Production. It worked in
test but was causing an error in Produciton. It was something so insignificant that it escaped attention,
until I finally figured out what happened. Fixed now. Whew. 1 Year Trial Period is now working as planned!
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Apr 4, 2020
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Back-End Stripe Programming - Update
Improvements to Stripe Payment system handling. Better logging. More reliable. Working on Error handling as
well. Coming along.
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Landing Screen - Update
I noticed that when I put the login information in the boxes and then press the Enter key the form doesn't
seem to load correctly and the login dialog just disappears. So I put the login and registration forms
inside their own panels and gave each one their own default button. Ahhh... that fixed it. You can now
press Enter, instead of having to click the button with your mouse. Better.
-
Character Equipment Table - Bug Fix
Very minor, but when the Character has no Equipment the table would show up with two extra cells empty at the end.
Fixed.
-
Apr 2, 2020
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Player Intel - Updates
When selecting a GM the form did not un-select the Joined World, so that when you wanted to try to pick your
World again, it would not post back, and show you that World's details. Not so good. Fixed.
In addition a few updates to the page controls placement for ease of viewing.
-
Apr 1, 2020
-
Character Equipment, Weapons and Armor - Enhancements
Just going over these three forms to make them look a little smoother and fix up a few things like button
display locations and such. Nicer. Getting there.
-
Race Things Info - Bug Fix
In the Character Armor page the list for the Race Weapons and Race Armors on the right side inadvertently
listed them as "Class Weapon" and "Class Armor". They now say "Race Weapon" and "Race Armor" correctly.
-
Mar 30, 2020
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Adventure Events Button - Enhancement
On the Manage Adventures page there is a button titled Manage AdvGroup Events, however it would only show on the
page if the Adventure is ready to add Events (it needs to have Adventure Groups associeted to the Adventure before
you can add Events). However, this was a bit of an error visually, so now it shows, but is disabled until you
add Adventure Groups. Plus updates to the tooltips to make them clearer. Better. Chip chip.
-
World Delete - Bug Fix
After deleting a World (say it ain't so!) Mythos Machine was trying to reload the now defunct world into memory,
which of course wouldn't work, and so it was thinking no worlds were available instead of picking a still existing
World, if there is one, to display. Fixed.
-
Treasure Distribution - Bug Fix
So at the end of an Adventure you know what the Players want. The Loot! But there was a silly bug where it
was not letting you select the first person in the list of characters to distribute treasure to, though it would
let you distribute to everyone else. Lol. Sorry #1. Fixed!
-
Mar 29, 2020
-
Print World - Player View - Enhancement
When you are in Print World as a GM then on the left you have a tree view of places in your world to select.
On the right it shows you the Campaigns, Adventures and Events associated to that Place, and places below it.
However, when you are in the World Print as a Player trying to learn as much as you can about "known things" that
the GM has allowed Players to see, the Campaigns and other list boxes are hidden. For your own protection, of course.
However, that left a lot of dead space on the right side of the screen. CrimsonScorpio to the rescue again
with another great suggestion. Now it will show the description of the place and if there is an image it
will show that. There you go Players. Eye Candy! Enjoy.
-
Manage Adventures - Enhancement
The Manage Adventures Page is designed to allow GMs to drill down quickly through their World to find
specific Adventures to work on. Formerly the page was structured so that Campaigns, Adventures and Events
were in listboxes one above the other in a straight horizontal line. This did not convey the idea that
Campaigns are containers for a series of Adventures, and that Adventures are containers for a series of Events.
Thanks to CrimsonScorpio's suggestion we now have a hierarchical step view that conveys this idea much
more clearly and intuitively. Thanks CrimsonScorpio. Great idea!
-
Print World Style Update - Bug Fix
The Print World to Word Document print allows you to print your World to MS Word documents. In fact
those are pure HTML documents with a *.doc extention, so you can open them in a text editor and
work with them as HTML quite easily (something MS Word native HTML is absolutely horrible at). Why
do that? Well, you might want to take your work and paste it into a proper Publisher software like
Adobe InDesign in order to really shape it yourself for publishing. So the Word document will allow
you to get the actual text into a document you can edit for printing. It's handy sometimes.
It will print to black and white and with plain text. I think it works pretty well, but it's still
under development to some degree. Anyway, it inexplicably stopped working ... I had but to provide
the correct file name in my code and voila. It's working again. Sweet.
-
Print World Style Update - Enhancement
There were a couple of things bothering me with the Print World HTML output. One was that there was an annoying
border around the "Date Printed" and the "Return to Print World". Another that CrimsonScorpio pointed out was that
the hyper links back to the Edit Screens for Places, Campaigns and Adventures was black, and so gave no visual
queue to indicate that they are hyper links. I made them black originally because the default hyperlink color
is a garrish blue. To compromise I made the color dark blue. Now they look fine and you can tell they are
hyperlinks. Good good. While I was at it I cleaned up the html build code to make it easier to read
and cleaned up a bit in the style sheets. Zug Zug. Keep going.
... a little later the same morning ... The Black & White World Print, btw, is also much nicer and cleaner now,
without any box-shadows or other distractions. So for clean printable versionsyou can choose that one.
The images will also come through as Black & White, too. Yay for CSS3.
-
Go to Manage Places from Print World - Enhancement
To make site navigation just that much easier you can now go directly to Manage Places from the Print World page.
You can then jump back to the Print World page when you are finished editing. The Players will not see the
Manage Print World button, but the GM of the World (and/or Co-GMs in the case of Shared Worlds) will see it.
The button, however, will only be actually Enabled for the person who owns the Place. So if a Co-GM in a Shared
World is on a Place that a different Co-GM owns, they will not be able to click the button and get to the Edit
page for that Place. I like it. Thanks CrimsonScorpio for the suggestion.
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Mar 28, 2020
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Places Treeview - Enhancement
The Treeview for the Places hierarchy was including a bit too much information that was a bit confusing,
and unnecessary. Where there are two Campaigns associated to a Place it would show a "The Town of Fubar (C:2)",
and if the two Campaigns had a total of 5 Adventures it would show "The Town of Fubar (C:2)(A:5)". The coloring
was also set to reflect that information as well. In addition the lable above says "Place (# of Campaigns)".
To simplify the view, I removed the "(C:2)" and left is as "(2)" since it says what that is above in the label.
I also removed the "A(5)" as well. So now it has the color coding (bright for Campaigns, and brighter and with
and outline for Campaigns that also have Adventures), and just the number of Campaigns in parenthesies either way.
Much cleaner and looks much nicer.
-
Mystic Power Book Guild Class Designations - Bug Fix
When you create a new World it is based on an existing World in the Mythos Machine. It creates
an exact copy of the Proto-World for you so you can mess around with it as much as you want. We noticed
in testing that one thing was misssing. The new Worlds were not coming in with the Mystic Power Book
Guild Class designations from the original World. So that has been fixed. Easy peasy.
-
Show PC Groups - Bug Fix
On the Adventure Groups Management Screen is a checkbox that lets you show only the Adventure Groups that have
player characters in it, so you can hide your NPC groups and make it easier to find your Player Groups. This is helpful
when you have a large world with a lot of players in different groups. However that wasn't quite working due to
the change to the player management system. It's been fixed and works nicely again.
-
Player List in Characters Screen - Bug Fix
There is a drop-down list in the Player's screen that shows the list of all players in the current World.
It is there so that the GM can re-assign characters to other players in case a player can no longer make a
game, or any other similar type of situation. It also should allow the GM to set any Character to themselves
so that those Characters become NPCs, or start out as such if the GM Generated them. Due to a change in
how the application manages players (now allowing for banning) that feature missed a spot. The players
were showing up in the listbox, but not the GM, so the GM couldn't take over characters as NPCs. Woopsie.
Fixed.
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Mar 27, 2020
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COVID-19 Elthos RPG Response
Like many people and companies these days we want to do whatever we can to help during the Covid-19 Crisis. What can Elthos RPG do?
ALL Mythos Machine GM Subscriptions Absolutely FREE for 1 Full Year.
To do this in the simplest way possible we are extending our Trial Period to 365 days. To take adventage of this offer, create an account, or if you already have one, simply change your Subscription to any of the GM (Basic or Premium) Plans via your Account Settings. It's that easy.
Of course, we expect life will be fully back to normal soon, but in the meantime, if you're stuck at home due to Covid-19 or Job Layoffs, don't despair. Cultivate your fabulous imagination. Create your own fabulous RPG Worlds in the Mythos Machine and play them online with your friends. Enjoy! And if you find that you love the Mythos Machine during the course of the year, and wish to make a contribution, it will be gratefully accepted. Thanks, and enjoy the wonders of the Mythos Machine!
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Mar 24, 2020
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Quotation Marks - Bug Fix
When I started this project a long, long time ago, the database was Microsoft Access, and a very early version.
There was a problem where if there were double quotes in the data then the reports from Access would fail.
It was, iirc, an Access bug. So I slipped in a tiny little workaround into my generic database handling
routine that replaced double quotes with single quotes. It used to annoy me a little bit, but it wasn't
a show stopper for my world building. Just a bit awkward at times. I lived with it, and figured others
might not notice. Well, durh. This is NOT something people won't notice. So after all these years I finally
decided to go back and take a look at why double quotes won't save. Sure enough, it was that ages old workaround.
I had completely forgotten what it was about. Fortunately I comment everything. An so...
I removed the offending and incredibly obsolete line and Voila! You can use double quotes now. Gee that took long enough.
-
InUse Checkboxes - Bug Fix
When in the Player Mode the InUse Checkboxes for both Character Armor and Weapons was in a spot that looked
absolutely fine while in Gamesmaster Mode, but vanished without a trace in Player Mode... leaving players
with no way to change their own Armors and Weapons usage. Oh my. Ok fixed!
-
Default Stores - Bug Fix
There was a minor problem with default stores, the General Store and the Body Things store, where if a world
didn't happen to have one it wouldn't automatically get created. This caused a problem for some worlds where
if they didn't happen to have those two essential stores, then when you created a copy of those worlds they
wouldn't have the store... and it kind of was confusing things for new GMs. Ok quick tweak. Fixed now.
-
Adventure Groups Creation - Bug Fix
There was a problem with Adventure Groups being created on the fly in some cases, and it was bouncing the
Player out to Mainscreen whent they accessed Characters in some Marketplace Worlds. Fixed. Bingo.
-
Mar 8, 2020 to Mar 23, 2020
-
COVID-19
Due to the horror we have been facing these past few weeks, I have been looking at ways to update the system so I can make the
Mythos Machine a Free service through 2020. A lot of people are out of work now. World Building can help to keep people focused
on something other than their problems. So I will be updating the system soon with that. Not 100% sure how I want
to do it yet. Working on it.
-
Backend Cleanup
Doing a bunch of backend cleanup and code clarification, comments, etc. I have also been reviewing the
Cookies method and am considering changing the systme to handle user preferences in the database instead of in the
browser's cookies. It will be more reliable. Pretty sure.
-
Mar 7, 2020
-
Play Mode on Main Screen - Enhancement
On the advice of my wonderful Player / Game Tester - CrimsonScorpio, I added the current Play Mode of the
Logged in User to the header of the page so the Player will know what mode they are currently working in.
Options are "Player" or "Gamesmaster".
-
Mar 4, 2020
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Random Encounters Chart - Bug Fix
Once I implemented the Markup I noticed that the Random Encounters Chart Table was showing up with a
long inexplicable series of line breaks between the header of the chart and the actual table itself.
This oddity has been fixed by replacing CRLF with blank strings after creating the table. I also took
the opportunity to style the table with a touch more class, and the table cells now have borders and
a white background instead of transparent.
-
Print Pieces - Bug Fix
There's a handy utility for those who want to run Tactical Combat for their games. It will take any
Group of Characters and print out Piece Cards that have all the relevant information for running the
combat, including each Character's Name, Class, Level, Life Points, Attack Level, Armor Class, Damage Absorption,
Mystic Points, Mystic Attack Level, Mystic Armor Class, Weapons, and Armor. All in a neatly contained
card format that could fit neatly in the palm of your hand. However, unfortunately, this feature was a
bit borked up. So, yours truly went in and found the problem (it was an odd one, for sure), and fixed it.
It's working now. Have fun storming the castle! :)
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Mar 3, 2020
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Server Migration Woes - Bug Fixes
The hosting company for Mythos Machine was hacked. They decided to migrate to a new server on a more secure
platform. As a consequence the past week has been spent fixing issues with the site that were a result of the
migration. Still working on the tail end of those issues, but I think we are out of the woods at this point.
-
Z-Index - Bug Fix
The Z-Index on some elements were not set at the right levels so they were overlapping incorrectly. Fixed.
-
Feb 24, 2020
-
Feb 16, 2020
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World Print - Enhancement
As GM you may want to print out Experience Gains as part of your World Print. Now you can. If you click "Show Experience Gains"
on the World Print Options you will get the full list of Experience Gains for each Adventurer for each Adventure. Voila. However,
if you do not want to show Experience Gains, just leave it unchecked.
-
Mystic Power Books - Bug Fix
Ah, so! There was a minor bug when selecting Mystic Powers for Characters. If you selected a specific Mystic Power Book
the page wouldn't return the Powers you had selected for that book. Instead the list was empty. This was a very easy
oversight to make, and fortunately to fix. Instead of using MysticPowerID for the key, I changed it to MysticBookID.
Now it's working just fine. :)
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Feb 2, 2020
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Mystic Power Book - Class Selections - Bug Fix
There once was a little bug in the SQL code that was not showing all of the possible Mystic Classes so that
Mystic Books could be properly assigned. It was only showing those where the only Class Parts for the Class
were either Cleric or SpellChanter, and was not showing those that had either of those among the Class Parts,
such as Thief-SpellChanter. This has been fixed, so now my Illusionist book can be properly assigned to the
Illusionist Class (yes, Thief-SpellChanter). Good good. Onward.
-
Jan 29, 2020
-
Look & Feel - Enhancements
In reviewing the site from a new user perspective with CrimsonScorpio, some suggestions were made that I liked a lot,
and so I implemented them as follows:
- The General Information page is now named Home Screen
- The Create! Button is on the right, and has a tooltip explaining its use - this keep the Left to Right motion of interactions going in the correct direction. Before you had to hop from the right to the left to select a world and enter the Admin Console. A minor improvement perhaps, but more intuitive for new users.
- Closed the Accordian on Page Load - this makes it much clearer that there actually is an accordion there to be clicked on.
- Updated Discord Link - I am now using the Discord Icon which is much nicer and easier to notice.
- Player Name has been changed to "Member Name" to distingusih it from the Player vs Gamesmaster terminology. I didn't want to use the term "User" or "Account"... "Member" has a nicer ring to it for me.
-
Jan 12, 2020
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Print Characters - Bug Fix
Aha. There was another problem when printing an entire group of characters where the check for Mystic Characters was
not programmed quite right. So some characters who were mystics were not getting their Mystic Powers printed out.
That has been fixed now.
-
Jan 10, 2020
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Print Characters - Bug Fix
There was a problem printing characters when the character had only one or less armors. This has been fixed.
-
Dec 20, 2019
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House Rules - Bug Fix
There was a very minor bug, but it had to be squashed. When printing your World and appending your House Rules
to the print out, they would come in all underlined. Not so great. Fixed.
-
Character Requisite Stat Lables on World Printout- Bug Fix
Another minor bug, but yup... Squashed fast. On the World Printouts you can choose to print out stat blocks
for Adventure and NPC / Monster groups. You can also have previously changed the three primary Requisite names
with your own Alias names. So Strenght, Wisdom and Dexterity don't quite suit your World? No problem.
You can change them to whatever you want in your World's Configuration. And throughout the Mythos Machine it
will reference them as such. However, I missed a spot. In the Adventure Group stat block of the World print.
Ok. That's fixed now, too. Easy peasy.
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Dec 18, 2019
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BBCodes - Enhancement
I have added a couple more BBCodes to the Mythos Machine to help with formating World Printouts.
Now you can use the following codes:
| [U]blahblahblah[/U] |
Underline |
blahblahblah |
| [B]blahblahblah[/B] |
Bold |
blahblahblah |
| [I]blahblahblah[/I] |
Italics |
blahblahblah |
| [PRE]blahblahblah[/PRE] |
Preformatted text (keeps spaces) |
blah blah blah
|
| [H1]blahblahblah[/H1] |
Heading 1 |
blahblahblah
|
| [H2]blahblahblah[/H2] |
Heading 2 |
blahblahblah
|
| [H3]blahblahblah[/H3] |
Heading 3 |
blahblahblah
|
So now what you can do is add these codes to the text of your World's Places, Campaigns and Adventures it it will format
accordingly when you Print out to HTML. From there you can use your browser (well, modern browser, anyway) to Print to
PDF, and voila! You're ready to post it someplace. Tada!
A future iteration of this concept, actually, will be to allow you to post your own CSS Style Sheets, and then code up
your text with whatever styles you want. Which will be infinitely more flexible for you, provided of course you know CSS.
But that's for another day. For now, I'm tickled pink with what I've got, because I can now print lists with [PRE]
and they look CORRECT. Sweet.
-
Dec 9, 2019
-
Print World - Enhancements
The Print World feature looks fine in HTML, however, I noticed that when printing it out to PDF format there are some
minor, and slightling annoying issues. I tacked a few of those tonight. The principal one that caught my eye was
the Random Encounters Table which in the PDF escaped the Div it was in and pushed to the right outside its bounding box.
Not so great looking. So I reduced the font size in the Print CSS and that took care of that. While I was at it I
also renamed the table columns to somewhat easier to understand designations (I hope). I also notice that the cover picture
seems a bit too large in the PDF, so I will reduce the size if I can find a way to do so without disturbing the other
image sizes, which are fine the way they are. Lastly, I noticed that in some cases some table elements are extending
across pages, and so they don't look that great when printed. I will try to use "page-break-inside: avoid;" or its
siblings in the CSS to fix that, if I can figure out how to make that work nicely. Anyway, most of my time lately is
being spent on my new Campaign: The Way of All Flesh, which is play testing nicely. So there's lots of busy stuff
going on. Things are coming along nicely.
-
Dec 2, 2019
-
Character Armors - Category Enhancement
So there I was, minding my own World, "The Way of All Flesh", my first Cosmic Sci-Fi World, when I noticed that the
Damage Absorption (Energy) for a certain Armor was not being calculated correctly. And this was because of a configuration
problem in the code where I had added both Physical and Energy components to the same armor, but the code didn't appreciate
my sentiment, and excluded totaling up the Damage Absorption for the Energy part, but did Total the Physical Part. Stumped
as to what might be the cause, I dug in and there it was ... I had done a pretty fast job at putting the new system in
place for handling Energy Armors, and fudged over this quixotic aspect. Ok, time to finalize. And so now, you get three
options for Category of Armor: Physical, Energy, and Physical+Energy. And now it handles them all equally well. Enjoy
your new flexibility GMs! Of course doesn't this imply I should consider the same for weapons? Hmm... maybe so! I'll think
that one over a bit before even considering how to tackle it. But yes, I could imagine an Energy Sword, let's say, that
can do Physical and Energetic Damage. So yes, that's possible. Or how about a Plasma Bullet, or some such? Yep. Could be!
But I think I'll take a breather on that. This stuff is harder to do than it may seem from my breezy little notes here.
Breather. Maybe even a nap. :)
-
Dec 1, 2019
-
Character Weapons - Bug Fix
There was a dumb-bug where the if the Player (not the GM) went into the Player form and selected a Store before selecting
any weapon in either of the two lists, then the application would error. This was an oversite in the code that
relied on the player selecting something in the lists before changing stores. It has been fixed now. :)
-
Nov 19 - Nov 30, 2019
-
World Building
A whole lotta work was being done on "The Way of All Flesh" world in terms of World Building and fleshing out the Campaing
in preparation for Game Testing. It's coming along really well. We've had two Play Tests during this period and it's
been great fun.
-
Nov 18, 2019
-
Character Class - Bug Fix
There was a bug where the Character Class would not save correctly due to an oversight in handling the new Armor Category.
That has been fixed.
-
Nov 16, 2019
-
Character Print - Bug Fix
There was a bug! If your character was Using more than 2 Armors (originally intended for Shield and Body Armor) then
the Character Print would fail. Now it will propery display whatever armors you have set as In Use. The reason this
came up now is because I added Plasma Shields to the world, which can be worn in addition to Physical Armors such as
a Bullet Proof Vest and Shield. So now Armors will stack. You can even wear, let's say, Leather Armor and a Chainmail
and a Shield and the armors will stack in terms of Armor Class, Dexterity Modifiers, Movement Modifiers, and so on.
The reason I had the limit before was because in Fantasy Worlds typically you'd have just one Body Armor and one Shield.
Ok, bug fixed. :)
-
Nov 11, 2019
-
Save the Body Things and General Store from Destruction - Update
Each World needs to have at least one Store for Players, and one Body Things store for things like weapons and armors that
are body parts for characters, monsters and whatever races are in the World. There was a problem earlier where the Body Things
store and/or the General Store were deleted, or in some worlds didn't exist. I created a Check routine that looks for these
stores in the World and if it doesn't find them then it would create them. Unfortunately, this check wasn't programmed
perfectly (durh) and so in some cases I'd wind up with repeated stores where they didn't belong. I've temporarily disabled
the check, and to help prevent GMs from accidentally deleting the two required stores I've added a block for them, so that
they can't be deleted. I notify the GM that they CAN however, hide the stores from their players, if they so choose,
if they uncheck the Show To Players option on the Stores Edit page. I think that should do. Meanwhile, I'm curious what
hazard is hiding in the CheckStores routine and will take a peek at that as well.
-
Nov 10, 2019
-
Equipment Quantities - Enhancement
Equipment can now be bought and sold in quantities of more than one at a time, which used to be the case.
If you wanted to purchase, for example, 10 torches, you had to click the Purchase button 10 times. Now you
can type in the number of items you want to buy and it will purchase them all with one click. On the Character Sheet
it will show the item name and the quantity in parentheses next to the item. For example: Torch (10).
This is useful for those cases where it would be common for Characters to purchase more than one item at a time.
This would be particularly useful in the case where Characters might want to buy more than a handful of items at
once, such as if they were going to bring a wagonload of wine barrels to anothe town, or some such. I might mention.
though, that getting this to work was a bit more of a challenge than I expected it to be. Fun stuff, but now, geeze,
it's time for bed.
-
Nov 9, 2019
-
Printing House Rules - Enhancement
Now, when the Player or GM uses the Print World feature there is an option to append the House Rules of the World to
the printout. Definitely a worthwhile addition. I'm also contemplating whether or not the World shoud append the World
Description to the top of the document as well. Should that be standard? Or optional? Or leave it out? I'll think this
one over, but my guess is it should be pre-pended to the top of the document.
-
Nov 5, 2019
-
Armor Dressing Room - Enhancement
When putting on Armor it helps to know how well the Armor fits. Since some Armors, if they are bulky,
can effect the Character's Dexterity, and hence their Attack Level, it pays to know what the total
effect of wearing various Armor combinations will be. What happens if your Character puts on
Leather and Chainmail? What happens if the Character adds a shield? Does this combination lower
the Attack Level to the point where you would rather not wear that combination? Maybe so. And this
is where the Armor Dressing Room comes in. It lets you try on Armor before buying it by showing you
the effect on your stats. At the moment, though, this is kind of a prototype for the concept, as I'm
honestly not 100% happy with how it is displaying that information (it's kind of obscured by other
information), and also how it is presenting the information itself. It feels like it may be more
information than you actually need, so I may want to trim it down to the bare bones, but I wanted to
show how the final values are being calculated. Anyway, it's a step in the right direction and it
does provide useful information, even if it's too much, and kind of hidden away at the moment. Well
better forward progress than none at all, eh? Anyway, I like where it's heading, so there we have it.
-
Nov 1, 2019
-
Armor Class Physical And Energy Armors - Enhancement
Yes indeedie, I have been busy working on the issue that I brought up last time. To recap what the issue is...
Way of All Flesh is my first Science Fiction World. I didn't have things like Energy Weapons or Armors before.
When I added Plasma Shields I realized that the Armor Class Total was adding the Energy Absorption values and Energy
Armor Class Modifiers to the Armor Totals incorrectly. For example, if you have a Armored Suit, it is good against
bullets, but doesn't protect against Beam Ray Weapons. Let's say you create it to have an AC Mod of 4, and an
Damage Absorption of 2 because the fabric is tough and kevlar and stuff. Ok. So far so good.
But if you added a Plasma Shield to your Character's Armors, and gave the Plasma Shield an AC Mod of 2, and a
Damage Absorption of 3 vs Energy Weapons, what happens? Well, the Mythos Machine was totaling the Physical and
Energy Armor values together. So you'd see a Total Damage Absorption of 5 in this case.
But that's misleading and quite wrong. The character actually has a Dam Abs of 2 against bullets,
and separately 3 against Energy Weapons. They should not total together but be shown instead individually.
That was a problem. A serious one.
So I went ahead and programmed a solution. Now for every World that has Energy Armors, the Armors will
distinguish between Physical and Energy. You will see two Armor Class Modifier and Damage
Absorption totals. Armor Class Modifier (Physical) and Armor Class Modifier (Energy), and also
Damage Absorption (Physical) and Damage Absorption (Energy). Much better!
And for Worlds that don't have Energy Armors, they will see the former simpler view in order to keep things from getting
complicated for no reason in those cases. Why show Energy Armor values if the World has no Energy Armors because it's
a Medeival Fantasy World? No need.
-
Update Store Inventory - Bug Fix
I also fixed a pernicious bug that had been bothering me for some time, but I hadn't had the time to go take
a stab at it. Well, tonight I finally happen to be in that area of the code working on the above mentioned
issue, and so I took a peak. Aha! Yes, the bug was a simple one to fix, and had to do with how I was truncating
the name of the item so it will fit neatly into the Store Grid. Ok. Have to check the length of the string
to make sure it isn't shorter than my maximum length of 50 character, or it will bomb. Gotchya. Done.
Working nicely now. Yay. Finally.
-
Oct 24, 2019
-
Armor Dressing Room - Enhancement
This is a work in progress but heading in the right direction. It allows the player try on armor before buying it
to see what the effect on his or her character's stats will be, including Total Armor Class, Damage Absorption, and Dexterity
as well as the ancillary effect on their Attack Level with their currently used weapon.
The problem with it is that it is a bit indiscriminate at the moment and can add armors to the total inappropriately. For
example, in my current Cosmic Sci-Fi World I have hand guns and Beam Ray Pistols as weapons, and protective armor against bullets and
separate protective armor against energy weapons. Plasma Shields protect against Energy Weapons. The problem is that you can wear both
Protective Armor vs Bullets (Armored Suit) AND protective armor against Beam Weapons (Plasma Shields), and these protect against two different
types of weapons. But when wearing both it shows the total Armor Class inappropriately as higher than it really would be against one or the other
weapon. So if the Armored Suit gives you +2 AC vs Bullets and Plasma Shield gives you +3 AC vs Energy Weapons, the total shown on the form is
+5 AC, which is wrong. It will never total +5 AC. One thing I could do is simply configure Plasma Shield to have an Armor Class Modifier of 0,
however, this doesn't solve the problem for Damage Absorption, which has the same issue.
So I am noodling around with possible ways of addressing this. It's a bit of a pain as it means I may need to add a new sub-structure to the
system to handle the distinction between Energy Weapons and Physical Weapons. A way of doing that might be to add a new Property to both Weapons
and Armors that indicates what aspects they each protect and attack.
Weapons:
| Hand Gun |
Physical |
Yes |
No |
| Beam Ray Pistol |
Energy |
No |
Yes |
Armors:
| Bullet Vest |
Physical |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
No |
| Plasma Shield |
Energy |
No |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
The tables above delineate the concerns concisely. However, looking it over I think it is a bit of overkill given
the need. Right now I already have a designation for which Weapons are of what kind, and one of the categories of
Weapon is already in the list as "Energy". So GMs can currently designate specific weapons as energy weapons. So the
problem is now down to Armors. I could include an Armor Type which could include Physical or Energy as options. If I
add Armor Type to my armor object then I could delineate that Energy Armors Deflect and Absorb Energy attacks, while
Physical armors do the opposite. This could be handled in the Calculate Total Armor Class, in which case I could have a
function that Calculates Total AC Energy, and another one that Calculates Total AC Physical. Of course in Worlds where
there are no Energy Weapons this delineation would be unnecessary, but I could also check to see if any Weapons or Armors
in the World are categorized as Energy and if not then hide that information from the user.
That seems to make sense. And it's not a ferociously complicated change. On the other hand it would somewhat complicate
my current tidy Character Sheet print outs with more information than they currently have and I would have to figure out how
to present this information in a neat and concise way.
So as you can see I still have a bit more thinking to do. So for now, while I have released the Armors Dressing Room, I think it
best to hide it from view until I have completely resolved how to work this out. I'm close. But not quite close enough. I don't
think it will take too long to resolve this question, though, so hang in there. Dressing Rooms are coming.
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Oct 14, 2019
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Reports Organization - Update
I use a kind of homespun generic page navigation method in the Mythos Machine. My goal for it was to
make it easy for me to allow people to move around the application without having to explicitly keep
track of where they were previously. To do this I created a generic method which works nicely ... unless
you move into sub folders. Then it caused a problem. I had sub folders to keep the application orderly,
as there are somewhere around 140 aspx pages in the application (142 to be exact). However, I also, again
for organizational reasons, use a strong naming convention for page names. All Reports start with RPT_.
It occurred to me that I don't need both. It is just as clear to me to hunt down the tree for RPTs as it
is to look in the sub folder. And given that my little navigation utility was causing me *agita* whenever
I traversed sub directories, I did the sensible thing and flattened the structure. Smart move. No more
stray and annoying errors while navigating. Yay.
-
Oct 13, 2019
-
World Info - Cultures - Enhancement
Having changed Reports to World Information, I have also added today a view of the World's Cultures for
Players. They can select "World Cultures" from the drop-down list and this will bring them to a page that
shows all of the Cultures of the World that the GM has not hidden from the players. This information includes
the Name, Description, Values, Norms, Institutions and Artifacts of the Cultures. I now think I should also
include a new field called 'GM Notes' and with that allow the GM to hide particular secrets on the Cultures
from the Players. I may do that shortly. Stay tuned.
-
Oct 11, 2019
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Character Description - Update
I am now hiding the Character Secrets in the Character Print Outs, which will help to keep those secrets
safe. When the Player wants to see their Secrets they can check them on the website in the Charactor
Description page. All other Character Descriptive aspects, such as History, Personality, Traits & Flaws
are printed out on the Character Sheet if the Player selects "Print Descriptive" in the Print Options.
-
Reports - Update
I changed all reference from "Reports" to "World Information" in the variety of places it shows up.
Seems like a less technical term that explains more clearly what it is you should expect to find there.
-
Player Information - Update
Before when you viewed the Player Information item in the World Information Page it would show you all
Players who have characters in any of the GM's Worlds. However, this didn't seem quite right, so now it
shows only Player Info for those who are allowing email or phone to show
-
Character - Player Mode - Update
Earlier I had updated the Character Page so that Players (not the GM) would see a drop-down list showing
all of the Adventure Groups in which they had any Characters. They could then see a list of Characters
in that Group. However, this seemed like a bit of overkill, as most players will only have one to three,
or sometimes more if the GM allows it, Characters in a given World. So it seems better to just show the
list of the Player's Characters, and then show which Adventure Group the selected Character is in.
Saves a needless click for the Players.
The Gamesmaster however will still see the drop-down list for Adventure Groups because the GM will likely have
dozens of Characters, maybe more if they use the Auto-Gen feature a lot, and so providing the Adventure Group
selection gives them a useful way of filtering their abundant Character lists.
-
Oct 8, 2019
-
Character Allocation - Update
When creating a Character using the Allocation Method, you select the Race you are interested in from a
listbox on that page instead of going to the Race page. So for clarity sake I removed the Go To Race
Page button when using the Allocation Method. However, I realized that since you don't go to the Race page
you no longer see the Race details. So I added a nifty hover-over
button which shows all of the Race data you need to make a well educated and informed decision.
-
Player Intel - Update
I noticed that where the Player Intel page shows the World Information and the House Rules, if you have formated your
information with line breaks they were not showing up in the text with line breaks but instead crunching everything
together. This has been updated and now the line breaks show up as one would expect.
-
Oct 6, 2019
-
Character Class Skills - Enhancement
When changing Classes you will get a new selection of Class-specific Skills. So Fighters might get "Heavy Weapons",
"Hunting", "Horsemanship" while Thieves might get "Pickpockets", "Hiding in Shadows", and "Move Silently".
Before these skills were added to the Character in alphabetical order. Served the basic purpose, but always
results in Auto-Genned Characters having the same skills. Now I have Randomized the Skills selection. It will
now select randomly among all the primary skills. Elective Skills still need to be chosen randomly, unless
there are no Primary Skills available for the Class, in which case Elective Skills will be used instead.
In related news, I also am now prohibiting the Skill from being over the Level of the Character. In other words
when a Character is 3rd Level, they can begin to learn 3rd Level Skills, but not before. Earlier the form
was allowing Skills that were over the Level of the Character's head, so to say. Not any more.
-
Character Things - Tech Level - Enhancement
The Player can select the Character's Armor, Weapons and Equipment. On the forms where they can do so the
Tech Level of the items were showing as a number, like 1, 2, 3, etc, which represents their Tech Level,
but has no meaning to the Player. Now, it shows the Tech Level Description, such as "Stone Age", "Iron Age",
"Space Age", etc.
-
Character Class - Allocation Unlocked - Enhancement
Earlier, when playing in a World with the Character Generation type being Allocation, and going into the Class
form with an Un-locked Character, it would automatically have selected the Show Only Classes that Fit (based on
the currently saved Requisites). As the Requisites before being locked are not saved, but held in statis at
1's for each of the three, the only Class that would fit is Freeman. Now, in this case it will default to the
Show All Classes option, rather than the one's you can select via your Requisites. The work around in the old way
was to uncheck the "Show Only Classes that Fit" checkbox, which was easy, but you had to know to do so. This is
clearer and therefore better, of course.
-
Character LP, MP & Money GM Update - Bug Fix
On the Character form the GMs can see little "R" (for "Reason") buttons. If the GM wants to update Life Points,
Mystic Points, or Money of the Character, they can add a Reason for it that will be recorded in the
Experience Gains table. However, there was a bug, and under the circumstance where the adventure group to
which the Character belonged had not yet gone on any adventures the darn thing would go Boom. Ok, that's been
fixed and won't go Boom anymore. Yay.
-
Oct 4, 2019
-
Character Skills - Bug Fix
When removing the last Skill from the Character Skills list, the list would still show the last item as if
it hadn't been removed... when indeed it actually had. This has been fix.
-
Character Class - Update
Nothing you can see, but on the back end the code was simplified for clarity. Good for me.
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Oct 3, 2019
-
Player Intel - Update
Player Intel form had a bit of a convolution where if you are a Gameamster and you want to switch from
GM Mode to Player Mode, it wouldn't automagically select you from the Gamemsasters list and
the current world you are in from GM Worlds list, forcing you to have to do so manually. It wasn't a
lot of extra work, but it was a needless annoyance. That has been fixed.
-
Oct 1, 2019
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Player Intel - World Stats in World Info - Update
While it's great to see the Description of the World in the World Info box when you are browsing GM's Worlds
it is even better if you can know a little bit about the configuration of the World as well. So I have
added the Genre list, as well as the Character Gen Method, which can be one of three: Random Roll, Roll & Allocate,
or Allocation (where the GM assigns a number of points for you to distribute to your Character's Requisites). I've
also added the Race Generation Dice value for the world (between 1d6 and 4d6). That should do the trick, I think.
-
Characters Allocation - Race and Class Buttons - Update
When in Allocation Mode the Races are selected by the Player from the listbox in the Allocation Section.
Therefore the Race button was disabled, but really it should be invisible because otherwise it's confusing
to the Player as it is showing, but clicking it doesn't do anything. It is now Invisible in Allocation Mode.
Also, the Class button is now enabled after the Character is locked.
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Characters Allocation - IsLocked for GMs - Update
When the World is set to Allocation Mode for Character Generation the IsLocked checkbox was not
showing up for the Gameaster in GM Mode. This is required, however, so that the GM can un-lock
Characters if the Player has made a mistake. This has been updated and now GMs can un-lock
Characters by unckecking the option and clicking Save.
-
Things Sharing Form - Money Transfer - Bug Fix
You can transfer Weapons, Armors, Equipment and Money between Characters in your Adventure Group.
However, the Money Transfer wasn't working, though it said it was! Ok ok. Cool your jets. I
fixed it. Now you can transfer money and it gets to the Character you sent it to. :)
-
Character Form in Player Mode - Update
When you would go to the Character form as a Player you would see your list of Characters in one big list
regardless of which group they are in. This was confusing, especially if you happen to be the GM
visiting your World in Player mode to poke around. You'd see, for example, a lot of Auto-Generated
Characters with their generic names like Hum Fig 1, Hum Fig 2, but you might see a bunch of each if you
Auto-Genned more than one group of those Race Class combinitions and didn't rename the Characters.
So, I have modified the form so now it shows the drop-down list of the adventure groups you have
Characters in for the current World. On the other hand if you have Characters only in one Adventure
Group in that World then it will just show you the name of the Adventure Group without the drop-down.
That's much better.
-
Sep 29, 2019
-
Character Printout - Mystic Powers - Update
When printing Characters if the class was not a Mystical Class then the Character sheet would list
Mystic Powers "None". Instead, I have removed that reference to Mystic Powers entirely so that only
Mystic Classes will even see the topic listed.
-
Character Class - Heritage Selection - Update
When in the Class page the Player could change the Character's rolled Heritage status. However, only GMs
should be able to do that, so now only GMs can change the Heritage of Characters. For Players the drop-down
is disabled.
-
Character Description - Cultures Hiding - Update
When going to the Character Description page all of the Cultures were showing in the list, including those that
were designated as being Hidden to Players. This is a dead giveaway and major spoiler for Players. That has
been corrected and now only the World's GMs will see the full list.
-
Sep 28, 2019
-
Skill Learning Points for Negative Traits
One of my brilliant players, Donovan, pointed out that one could create Skills that act as negative traits which could
be assigned to player Characters, but that they should not cost any Skill Learning Points as they are a negative factor
for the Character. An example might be "stutters when nervous". He also suggested that they should get mitigated as
the Character goes up in levels and finds ways to mitigate or compensate for negative traits. At 1st Level the Character
always stutters when nevervous. But at 3rd they only do so on a roll of 2 out of 6. That kind of rule can be put
in the description of the Skill / Trait. To give room for this possibility I have set the drop-down list for Skill Learning
Points (SLP) to include 0. This way the GM can set a Negative Skill / Trait to 0 SLP and then assign it to Characters without
it causing a loss to their SLP. Fun. Great idea Donovan! Thanks again!
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Sep 27, 2019
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Character Armors, Weapons, Equipment Pages Formats - Updates
A number of page updates to make the formats consistant and appealing, in conjunction with some style updates to the CSS.
-
Character Class Form - Show All Classes That Fit - Bug Fix
When entering the Character Class form the "Show Only Classes that Fit the Character" checkbox was checked, but the
form would load without actually doing the check, and so all all classes would by default show up. This has been fixed.
-
Characters Skills Form - Update
While testing with my players I noticed that in some cases the Elective Skills were not quite showing up the way I wanted.
In my sci-fi game I have added Androids, and they get special Android Skills that sound the same as some human skills,
but work fundamentally differently, and so needed their own Skill. For example, for humans I have a "Detect Presence"
which is a mystic skill, but my player wanted a similar skill for his Android. It works with sensors, rather than
by mystic means. So I added a "Detect Presence - Android" skill, which made sense. And I added it to the All Skills table.
However, when listing Elective Skills for other players that Android Skill would show up along with the other Android Skills.
But the Players ought not to be able to select those as they do not make sense for humans. To fix this I have added a check
to see if the Skill is in the All Skills list when colleting the Elective Skills to show the player. If not then the skill
will not show up in their Electives List. So to eliminate players inadvertently stumbling across Android Skills I can
remove those skills from the All Skills List. This is not, however, a perfect solution, as there are plenty of Races
that should not have skills listed for other races, even as Electives. For example, a Dog can not learn Medium Weapons.
And removing Medium Weapons from the All Skills List wouldn't make sense either. Unfortunately, any solution for this
would require the GMs to do a lot of heavy lifting to maintain which skills should be included or excluded by which races
and in a World with a lot of races and skills that would turn out to be a burden to maintain. So for now I will do it this
way as a quick and dirty workaround that keeps it simple for the GM. At some point someone will say "oh darn this doesn't
quite work for me", but for now I will keep it this way, and my advice generally to the GMs will be, "Tell your players
not to take skills that make no sense for their Characters, and remove those skills from their Characters if they do."
GM Fiat and all that. Of course, that too is an imperfect solution. So I will keep ruminating about this. I'm sure to
come up with a reasonable solution soon enough. For now, this will do.
-
Sep 26, 2019
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Characters Form - Mystic Powers Button - Update
The Select Mystic Powers button on the Character Form uses a check to see if the Character is a member of a mystic class.
In the old method we assigned each class sub-Classes to create Multi-Classes, and so Mystic Classes will either have a
SpellChanter or Cleric among the sub-Classes, or be a Freeman class. However, what I was not doing was checking to see
if there are any mystic power books assigned to that class. Now it will check both. This way you might as GM want to create
a class that is not mystic, but still has access to Mystic Powers (for some reason that the GM might come up with).
So now the check will look at both factors and if either is true the Mystic Powers button will show.
The only problem I see with this is that if they are a member of a mystic class but the GM has not assigned any Mystic Power Book for that
class yet, then the Select Mystic Powers button will show up and the player might be confused when they get to the form and there are
no mystic powers to choose from. Of course this would give the GM a chance to figure out that they need to either remove the sub-Classes
or assign a Mystic Power book to the class when the players ask about that.
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Character And World Config - Character Gen Description - Update
The text in the Character and World Config forms related to how the three Character Generation methods work has been updated for clarity.
-
Player Intel - World Selection - Bug Fix
When entering the Player Intel Form if one had already selected a World then the form would
automatically select whatever World is at the top of the Joined Worlds List. This is not
always the best thing to do, so it was fixed. Now, it will only select the first World
if there is no currently selected World, and otherwise it will select whichever World is
current for the Player.
-
Sep 20 to 23, 2019
-
Experience Gains Historical List - Bug Fix
The Historical List for Experience Gains had a bug where if you selected an Adventure Group that had no
Adventures and then selected to look at the Generic Events (the ones the GM does arbitrarily, such as
assigning money or changing Character Levels), then the page would crash and send you off to the MainScreen.
This has been fixed, but more work still needs to be done with that form to make it more user friendly.
-
Character Weapons, Armor and Equipment - Enhancement
Update to the Pages design - eliminated poorly used space and brighten Key Information zones. Looks nicer.
-
Character Weapons, Armor and Equipment - Enhancement
Update to the Pages design - eliminated poorly used space and brighten Key Information zones. Looks nicer.
-
Character Equipment - Enhancement
Update to Markup verbiage advising players to be smart shoppers because differnt stores can have different markups depending on
local conditions and other reasons the GM may have in mind. Wise shoppers can save money.
-
Character Weapons & Armor - Bug Fix
Character Weapons & Armor - Natural Body Things should not be removable.
-
Character Weapons, Armor and Equipment - Enhancement
Character Armor - for Players do not get shown the Magical Options. This view is best kept to the GMs themselves. That
information, in any case, is available to the Player elsewhere on the page.
-
Character Weapons, Armor and Equipment - Bug Fix
When in player mode Worlds the Player had already joined were showing up in the in GM Worlds drop-down list. They shouldn't
show up in both lists. This has been fixed.
-
Wepaons, Armor and Equipment - Enhancement
In Weapons, Armor and Equipment Screens the - Inventory Count and Markup indicator has been removed for Players. This information
does, however, show for GMs.
-
Class Selection Screen - Enhancement
A better description now informs players that when you select a class the Mythos Machine automatically gives your Character the
default things that show in the information screen on the right.
-
Sep 19, 2019
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Email Character Transfers to GM - Enhancement
When Players want to transfer something(s) from their Character to another Character in their Adventure Group
the system will now send the Gamesmaster an email letting them know who has trasnfered what to whom. This allows
the GM to stay abreast of what is happening in their World.
Default Skills Rules Page - Update
The Default Rules for Skills was updated for clarity.
Main Information Screen - Update
When in Player Mode the Main Screen was showing all GM public Worlds in the drop-down list, but Players should only
see Worlds have already they joined in that list. When in GM Mode they should see all of their own Worlds. That has
been fixed.
-
Sep 15, 2019
-
Character Page - Update
Just a few little updates to the Character Screen... I changed the "Delete" button to read "Kill", which is less technical
sounding and more RPGish-fun. I also removed the "Clone" button as it is still in Beta and no need to show it on the
screen at this point. I also updated the Tooltips on a variety of buttons as well. Minor, but a bit of fun update.
Reports Page Load Time - Enhancement
The more Characters and Groups in your World the slower the Reports Page would load. My World of Elthos has a LOT of
Characters and Adventure Groups ... it was taking a looooong time (more than 4 seconds)... A quick look at the code and
two procedures later it now loads lightning fast, as it should.
World Form - Go To ... - Enhancement
The World Form has a drop down menu that lets you go to other forms such as the World Configuration Screen and
the Admin Things Screen... I noticed that there was a kind of minor (to my mind) disconnect in that you had to
go back up to the Admin Screen and then back down into the Characters Screen to work on Characters ... so I added
a link from the World Screen directly to the Characters Screen and the Reports Screen. This should give the
Mythos Machine more intuitive navigation.
Guild Class Form - Enhancement
The Guild Class form now shows the Race selections Checkbox in the Additional Options and creates a record for
each new Race - Class combination when new Classes get created. This way you can set the options for Race - Classes
from either the Race form when you create a new Race or the Class form when you create a new Class, making the
system more convenient to configure for GMs.
Weapons Form - Update
The order of the Details view items has been changed to make it easier to track weapon damange, and so now
Bonus Damage appears after the Number of Dice and Number of Dice Sides, instead of before the Attack Level Modifier.
All Things Forms Additional Options Form - Update
The name of the selected item is now highlighted on the form header so it is easier to see.
Race Additional Options - Enhancement
A 'select and deselect all checkboxes' option has been added to the Race Class Checkbox Selections list, which
makes it easier to assign or unassign large numbers of Race Class selections at the same time.
Race Additional Options - Bug Fix
When filling the Race Classes Allowed checkbox list, all of the Races would be selected instead of only
the ones that had been saved as "Allowed". This has been fixed.
-
Sep 11, 2019
-
Backend Player Mode - Bug Fix
When the player would switch to Play or GM Mode, if they logged back in, or were bounced to the Mainscreen
by an error, then the Play Mode might be switched on them inadvertently. This has been fixed.
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Sep 9, 2019
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Race Class Selection Option - Updates
Originally in the design I decided to provide all Races with a Freeman class by default, and without the ability of
the GM to override it. It was a quick and dirty solution to the question of "What if the player doesn't like any of
the GM's Class selection options?"... however, the problem with this solution is that it causes more problems, potentially,
than it solves. For example, I have a Race of Androids. They do not get mystic powers. However, the player, Donovan my
Super-Helpful-Game-Tester-Buddy, selected as his Android's Class Freeman... which then gave him access to Mystic Powers...
which are beyond the capabilities of Androids generally. So I realized that sometimes the GM really does want to
NOT offer Freeman class. Therefore I updates the system to allow the GM to add Freeman as a selectable Class for a
given Race, but not make it mandatory. And, if there are no Classes assigned at all to a given Race, then Freeman is
added as a selection. I think this solves potential conflicts and keeps the system nice and flexible.
I also fixed a bug with the Mystic Power's screen where it would error if the GM had not added any Mystic Power Books
to a particular Race Class combination, and yet the Race is mystic in nature. This can happen inf the GM allows
Freemen, but has not added any Mystic Power Books to the Race-Freeman combination yet. It will alert the Player that
there are no Mystic Power Books associated to that Race Class, so they can mention it to the GM.
-
Sep 6, 2019
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Race Class Selection Option - Enhancement
This feature allows the GM to define which Classes are allowed by which Races on the Edit Race Screen. This way you can
select specific Classes that are selectable by the Players for the Race they have chosen.
For example, I have an LX-1 Android Race, for which I created the LX-1 Agent
Class. Before, though I
created the Class I had no way of excluding other Classes from the list that the Player would see. Now, however,
I can exclude all classes except the XL-1 Agent, or include whichever one's I think are appropriate selectively.
Much, much better!
-
Sep 5, 2019
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World Player Banning - Enhancement
Ok, let's face it. Some people are jerks. So we need a way to keep the Jerk Factor under control for our Worlds, and
to this end I have implemented a Player Ban and Player Un-Ban feature that appears in the Player Intel page. The feature
is viewable in Gamesmaster Mode, and allows you to select one of your Worlds, and show the list of players in it. Let's say
one of them is a Class A Jerk. So you can click a button and Ban them from all of your Worlds. Later, if you change
your mind you can Un-Ban them as well. Their Characters will still be present in your World even while the Player is
Banned, but that Player will not be able to access your World and so will not be able to interact with those Characters.
As you can tell this is a topic with lots of pros and cons. On the one hand the Player themselves owns the Intellectual Proprty
that they contributed to their own Characters... such as the writing up of the Character's history or personality or whatever.
You may have added to that as well, as the GM. So who owns what in those cases? That's a problem.
So for simplicity sake, I take that the Player owns their own Characters. So therefore, even if you ban them from your World
they should still be able to take their Characters with them, and maybe use them in someone else's World... maybe? So,
in that case we'd need a way to provide the Player with that ability in case they get banned. After all... maybe its the GM
who happens to be the jerk. We don't want to rob the player of their own stuff, do we?
So, there are still a some details that need to be worked out on this. That said, as of today, GMs can Ban and Un-Ban players from
their own Worlds, which is at least a step towards mitigating the Jerk Factor. More updates on this will surely follow.
-
Sep 4, 2019
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Random Character Generator - Limbo Update
Generating Random Characters is cool and all, but we were leaving them as detrius in GM's public Worlds. I thought that
might be cool but on second thought, nah. So I updated the system to create the Characters and then place them in Limbo
so that they no longer show up in the GMs Character lists. Better, I think.
-
Sep 3, 2019
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Player Intel Page - Updates & Enhancements - Round 3
With the number of changes made thorough testing has been required ... which resulted in further updates and improvements
to the Player Intel page functionality. It now will show the appropriate Worlds for GMs and Players, and properly allow
GMs in Player Mode to access their own Worlds to view them as a Player will see them. And with round 3 another pass at
simplification of the code base which has resulted in a more flexible and maintainable system for the long haul.
Updates to the Look & Feel of the CSS on various pages, and a minor reorganization of the Main Screen, along with a
cleanup of obsolete text there.
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Aug 31, 2019
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Player Intel Page - Updates & Enhancements - Round 2
Well, my first pass at the Player Intel update didn't work out as well as I had hoped. There were issues. So those needed to
be resolved. I employed Programmer Strategy #4927: When in doubt, simplify. The form is now a lot cleaner and handles things
much more simply than before, from a code perspective. It had a lot of left over complications from an earlier version wherein the
GM could create Player Accounts for their friends, and do a variety of player management operations. Since I moved those features
to the User Account page, there was obsolete routines and processes that were no longer being used, but still nestled in the code
of the Player Management page. So that all got, finally, removed and it only took a few days to sort through all the little gotchya's
involved. Much better now. Still havea little more testing to do, but it's a much better form than it was. Much, much better.
Of special note, what it does is allows the Player to come in and select a World to Join by picking a GM and seeing some promo information
about the GM's Worlds. They can then send a request to join the World, and an email will be sent to the GM notifying them that a player has
requested an Invite to their World. If the GM goes ahead and send the Invite the player gets and email with a link that gives them access
to the World and takes them to the Character generation screen.
In addtion, if the Player is also a Gamesmaster, they can switch to GM mode to work on their own Worlds. The form allows them to
select any of their Worlds, which they can also do on the Worlds Form. But the Player Intel form ALSO allows the GM to select their
own Worlds while in Player Mode. This is very useful because it allows the GM to view their World as any of their Players will see it.
So with that ability the GM can make sure that things are working correctly, such as the appropriate Races and Classes, Weapons, Armors, etc
are available to the Players as the GM intends. It is a very helpful feature.
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Aug 24, 2019
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Player Intel Page - Updates & Enhancements - Round 1
The Player Intel page (formerly called "Player Info", but I like the sound of "Player Intel" better) allows the player to do a
number of things. The earlier version of the page only allowed you to switch between Player and Gamesmaster Mode and select Worlds, that once
selected you could then Generate Characters in. As GM you can review your Players and their Characters in each of your Worlds, and jump to a selected Character.
However, this left the GM with little control over who could join and generate Characters in their Worlds. So an improvement is needed.
Now in Player Mode you can review Public Worlds and request an invitation to join that World, which the GM can accept or not.
You can now also review the Worlds you have joined, the Characters in those Worlds, and jump to that Character, as well as exit from
the World if you wish, which will delete all your Characters there.
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Aug 22, 2019
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GM Player Invitation System - Bug Fix & Upgrade
The GM Player Invite System allows a GM to Invite Players from the list of Players on the system to their World. To do this
the Mythos Machine sends the Player an email telling them they have been invited to join the World of (whatever the World name is)
and provides a clickable link for them to use to join the World and start generating Characters in it.
Before the fix, when they click the link it would bring them to the Character Generation Page of the World, so long as they were
already logged in. It also didn't pay attention to whether or not they were in as a GM or a Player. So in those cases naughtness
would occur, and the process would be pretty messed up. This all has been fixed, and now those contingencies are taken care of.
If the user is not logged in, the email link will bring them to the login page, and as soon as they log in it will then take them
directly to the World's Character Generation Page, as a Player, not GM. This is an improvement. Fo shizzle.
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Jul 29 - Aug 22, 2019
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Work on various Mythos Machine Worlds
As there is a deficit of Worlds in the Mythos Machine, this period has been focused on creating and shoring up the Proto Worlds and
providing the Marketplace with Worlds for Sale for Marketplace GMs, and others, to purchase. The Bushido World has advanced nicely, as well
as the Cosmic Space Opera World of "The Way of All Flesh". The Western World has also seen some improvements as well. The process of building
out these Worlds, as one might imagine, requires considerable thought, deliberation and research. And so progress is necessarily a bit slow,
and time consuming. That said, much progress has been made and each World has its own peculiar charms, and those with any historical or scientific
focus are better researched and more accurate than they were before. Progress on this front continues.
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Jul 28, 2019
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Race Bulk Edit - Bug Fix
When you want to edit a bunch of things at the same time in any of the Edit Things (Weeapons, Armors, Races, etc) Pages
you can select Bulk Edit, and it provides the information in a format to allow you to do so. However, in the case of
Races this page was not loading. This has been fixed and it loads as it should now.
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Jul 27, 2019
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Cross Reference Data - Clean Up
There was a bug where the names of items in cross reference tables were not exactly matching what I wanted.
For example, in the Race_Weapons table I was getting only the Race Name, but the Weapon Name was being left out.
This didn't effect the functioning of the table as the Race and Weapon IDs were correct, but it did mean that
for the World Things Holes Report, a very useful tool for GMs, the names were not appearing as intended.
So I went through the application and fixed that. It was an odd issue as it worked at one point, and then
stopped working when I made a change that seemed at the time would not have this kind of effect. But it did.
Now that's fixed. I also went through and cleaned up the erroneous data from before so now all names
will show nicely in the Holes report. :)
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Jul 21, 2019
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Session State Management - Update
For a very long time (probably over five years) I've had this warning on the Information Page under the Website Information Tab:
"Warning!: Do NOT open the any individual Mythos Machine Page in separate tabs in the same browser at the
same time and then save anything! This can (and will!) corrupt the data in your World! This is an issue we are working to resolve,
however, for the time being, please avoid doing this terrible thing. It is very naughty!"
After considerable effort at the time, I failed to find a workable solution.
Fortunately, my buddy PeeWeeRota over on MeWe pointed me in the right direction yesterday, and it has to do with a
single setting in the web configuration that allows the session reference to be posted in the page URL instead of in memory.
This fixes the problem! Thank you PeeWeeRota!!
There are three downsides to this.
-
I can no longer use pop-ups as each new window will require a login. Fortunately the only
place I used a popup was for the Dice Roller, and the only reason I used it there was so that one could move it out of the way of the
page if needed.
-
The URLs that show up in the browser address bar incredibly long and ugly, going from something like
this:
//test.mm.elthos.com/MembersArea/Elthos_ODS/MainScreen.aspx
to this:
//test.mm.elthos.com/(F(gjPwCURccwMZrAZsH8cs-ttcNPO37k5EzoKFekv
tKJIKlawbx3HPetPqPIopm1PQQShISrR1HxanwFn7
NIgu1X_mtg6u92afrvcFdyQ8QXuei6zRp_7GFlHjf
h1fhnsHyJcvv6LukjsqQishaj4kDT2fyxOq7eJ9eERf
TyK-XgnvQPPd0))/MembersArea/Elthos_ODS/MainScreen.aspx
-
Any time a user wants to open a new tab to look at data on another page in their World (or any other World) they will have to
log in again. Some users may find this an annoyance, but that's a price that needs to be paid in order to avoid a far worse evil:
data corruption.
That said, I'm delighted. I don't mind losing the Dice Roller for the time being. And I also don't mind the long URL as it was somewhat ugly before
anyway since ideally it would not show the names of the actual pages, but that's another thing that I was never quite able to get to work when I tried
to replace Response.Redirect with Server.Transfer, despite a couple of weeks of noodling around with it.
So all is well, and this is a GIANT win for the Mythos Machine. Data corruption has now been eliminated as a threat to multi-tab users! Woot!
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Jul 18, 2019
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Session State Management - Update
There was a subtle bug that was caused when a session state would time out and the user would then proceed in
executing certain actions. The effect was such that some of the data in the database would be corrupted. In order
to eliminate this possibility I went through and added a session validation to all postback operations on every
page, and if the session is timed out then the page will be redirected to the login page, and if the user is
still logged in (which can be the case even though the session has timed out) then it will pass them along
to the Main Information page. This is better, I think, then sending them to a "there was an error" page, and lets
them just skip a beat and go back to where they were without having to worry about what kind of glitch it was.
Session timeouts should be rare with the application as it has a mechanism to reset the session every 11 seconds by
performing a hidden page postback which lets the server know that the user is still out there with their browser
on a given page. However, sometimes that still fails and so session timeouts still occassionally happen. This revision
should help, and hopefully eliminate, the possibility of an inadverent Save without a session object that could
corrupt data.
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Cloning Worlds Character Experience Gains - Bug Fix
There was another subtle bug that I rooted out that caused experience gains of Characters from a Proto-World to not
be created for the corresponding Characters in the new World. Thus, all Characters of cloned Worlds would wind up
starting at 1st level regardless of what they were in the Proto-World ... which of course isn't what I'd want.
This also has been fixed.
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Jul 8, 2019
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Places TreeView - Update
As I'm working on my new Packaged World, "The Way of All Flesh" I noticed The Places Treeview has not
always filled in the re-coloring for Places that have Campaigns and Adventures. I took a look at it
and realized that if a Place somewhere down in the TreeView had been selected then it would only
check the nodes for that Place and below. Aha. Ok, that's been fixed now. I also took the opportunity
to centralize that code so that in the future, should I need to adjust it again, I will only have
on spot to update, instead of a handful. Much better.
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Packaged World Names - Update
When you have a Packaged World, it is shown in your list of Packaged Worlds by name. However, when you
changed the name of your World that name was not being updated in the Packaged World list. This has been
updated so now when you save your World the system will save the revised name to the Packaged Worlds list as well.
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Jul 7, 2019
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Cloned World Name - Bug Fix
When creating a cloned World, which you would do if you wanted to have copy of one of your existing Worlds,
perhaps to build branching World History or Campaigns off of, the name of cloned World had the same name
as the original World + "Clone(20190707120122)" (which is the date plus hours and seconds) in order to prevent
two Worlds having duplicate names in the system. You could then rename your World something more suitable after
that. However, if the original name was over 35 Characters then it would cause an error because names can only be
a maximum of 50 Characters. Oh darn. So I have mitigated this by only taking the first 50 Characters of the name
and saving that to the database. I also shortended the prefix and removed the parentheses so cloned World names will
have names like this instead: "MyWorld CLN-20190707120122".
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World Name CSS - Update
On the title section of each page, if the World name is longer than roughtly 35 Characters then the name will wrap to the next line.
To mitigate this I have reduced the font-size of the label so it should fit in most cases now.
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Archived Campaigns & Adventures In the Places Treeview - Update
The Treeview lists show color coding and the number of Campaigns and Adventures in each Place where they exist.
However, before they were including Archived Campaigns and Adventures. This shouldn't be the case, and so that
has been corrected now.
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Jul 1, 2019
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Random Encounters Interface - Update
I have updated the the Random Encounters Interface to operate more smoothly. Earlier the treeview would not update
until you came back into the page, but now it will as soon as you add new Random Encounter Charts and save their
Weighting options. It also now refreshes the lists when you change Places in the Places Tree View.
Checkbox List Background Color - Update
I also removed a problematic background color problem that was afflicting checkbox lists by updating the CSS.
Earlier the background color was changing once you scrolled down the list. It no longer does that.
Default Screen - Update
There was a problem with the Default Screen Login Dialog box where if you selected a pre-existing option from
a prior entry to the Name textbox, the label "Login Name" would change and the words wrap, causing the
dialog box to appear jumpy. It no longer does that.
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Jun 29, 2019
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Random Encounters Chart on World Print - Enhancement
You can optionally configure each Place in your World to have its own unique Random Encounter Chart which
you can optionally show in your World Print. Before it showed you the percent chance to encounter it
according to the weighting distribution you assign when you do your Random Encounters configuration. Now
the new and improved chart shows a Roll 3d10 column, which gives you the 3d10 rolls you need to encounter
the various things. The way you configure your Encounter Charts is by adding Races from your Worlds Races, and then assigning a relative weight to how common they are. So something rare would get, for example, a 1, while something common would get 4. You decide. From that the system generates the chart for you when you print your World. And the Chart would look something like this:
Random Encounter Chart for Kitt Peak Space Port
| Cobra |
3 |
42.86% |
001 to 430 |
1d2 |
| Horse |
1 |
14.29% |
431 to 574 |
1d1 |
| Wolf |
3 |
42.86% |
575 to 000 |
1d6 |
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Jun 23, 2019
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Race Activities - Bug Fix
When creating a new Race the Race was not being added to the Race_Activities table, so when you wanted
to use the Race for Random Encounters the Activities were not showing up in the Encounters Page for the new Race.
This has been fix.
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Jun 21, 2019
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Page Processing Speed - Enhancement
After having implemented Stripe as the payment system the page load times increased from about 1 second to
2 to 4 seconds. Wishing to improve the load times back to their former speed I looked deeply into the
matter and found a way to optimize the process so that the page load times are now back to ~1 second.
Some pages will still load up to 2 seconds or so if they are processing a lot of data in advance of
showing the page. Please be patient in those cases. Thanks! Further optimizations will be explored
as we move forward.
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Page Processing Error Handling - Enhancement
Session Timeouts are the bane of ASP.Net. When that happens then any objects stored in the page will
turn to dust, and the next time you click a button or anything the page will fail and you'll be sent
to the error page. Sooo... to fix this I am now checking to see if the Player object is nothing on the page
load, and if it is then it gets filled again then and there, and so that should eliminate those errors
and the site should operate much more smoothly now. I hope. This one will require long term testing
but I think it should work! So far it looks good.
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Print World Hyper Links - Bug Fix
When you print your World using the Print World function, if you are the Gamesmaster then hyperlinks
to the Edit Pages for your Places, Campaigns and Adventures should show up in the HTML Printout. This way
as you're reading, if you see something you want to edit, you can click the Name of the Place, Campaign
or Adventure and it will bring you directly to the Edit Page for it so you can edit it quickly. This was
not happening conistantly, so that has been fixed. It also accounts for whether or not you are working
in a Shared World, and if you are, and you do not own the Place but another GM in the Shared World does,
then the Printout does not offer you a HyperLink.
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Jun 18, 2019
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Store Inventory Equipment Name - Bug Fix
When creating a new Equipment and adding it to a Store, the name was not transfering correctly. Fixed.
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Jun 17, 2019
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World Printout - Campaign and Adventure Sort Order - Bug Fix
The sort order of the Campaigns and Adventures in the World Print were going by order entered, rather than the
designated Sort Order or World Date. This has been corrected and now they sort in the order intended by the GM
when creating them.
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Jun 15, 2019
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Character Mystic Powers Selection Page - Bug Fix
Interestingly, when going to the Mystic Power Page some of the named of Powers in the list happen to show up as
the name of the Mystic Power Book. This was a problem with the SQL Query. I needed to include a sub query
that got the name of the Power, rather than the name of the book. That has been fixed and the Power Names
show up and save correctly now. This was an oddball bug in that it only happened in certain cases where
the World was built originally where the cross reference table has the book names rather than the power names.
All good now.
I also improved a minor issue with the look of the page while correcting the SQL Query. It now conforms to
the other forms in terms of the size of the user selection table. It was truncating at width 90%.
Funny how little things like that really do count a lot. I feel it looks much better now, though the difference
as actually pretty trivial.
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Jun 14, 2019
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Random Adventure Group Generator - Bug Fix
Naturally, when you create a new feature, something can go wrong. It did. When I added the personality and traits randomizer
to the Random Character I also added it to the already existing Random Adventure Group Generator. Ok, it seemed to work, but
there was a bug that caused the Random Adventure Group Generator to explode when using it. It was a matter of moving the
personality generation code to a spot after the Character was already saved to the database. Tada. It's all good now.
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Character Mystic Powers Selection Page - Bug Fix
When entering the Character Mystic Powers page it was not selecting the correct list, nor enabling the Add and Remove Buttons
in the correct fashion. This has been fixed. Now, when you come to the page, if your Character has any Mystic Powers
Available it will select the first one in the list for you, and enable the Add button. If you have no available Powers, but
do have Powers in the Character Mystic Powers list then it will select that list for you, and enable the Remove button.
Ok, that's how it is supposed to work, and now it does. Great.
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Jun 4, 2019
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New Forward Facing Random Character Generator without an Account - Enhancement
In order to demonstrate the power of the Mythos Machine, I added a button on the Default Page that reads "Gen Character"
with hover text that reads: Auto-Generate a Fast Random Character from a Distant World!. This feature rolls random
Characters / Races / Classes from random Public Worlds in the system and equips them with Skills / Powers / Weapons / Armor
based on the configuration that the GMs have made for their Worlds, so as the system grows it should get more interesting as well.
It also randomly generates Personalities, and Traits / Flaws for the Characters. Fun stuff. :)
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Jun 4, 2019
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Server Side Processing - Enhancement
The World Things Trading Post SQL has been updated and rationalized better so that runs more efficiently and is
more extenible in case further features need to be added going forward. Users can now filter by viewing all Public Worlds,
or the Proto Worlds in case they want to restore some Things that they've changed along the way, or their own Worlds
in case they want to transfer Things between them. The only Worlds that do not show up at all are Purchased Worlds
as those are copyright owned by their authors, and therefore we do not offer the ability to share from them.
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May 31, 2019
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Server Side Processing - Enhancement
I'm now embarking on a program of optimization and have begun working towards that goal. Today I released a version
of the back end code that more efficiently loads data from the database to the web pages. This kind of work is
tricky and fraught with the possiblity that code and database changes could inadvertently effect the site,
so the work is necessarily slow and tedious. However, it will also enhance the user experience overall, and
generally speaking must be done at some point. My strategy will be to try to reduce page load times. That said,
the main reason the pages load somewhat slowly is because of the amount of data being processed by each page, and
loaded into the application memory to make use of the page more effective for the users. Because of this there
is probably no realistic way to make the page loads instantaneous. But I will be looking for ways to make it
as fast as possible.
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May 21, 2019
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World Things Trading Post - Enhancement
The World Things Trading Post System allows GMs to copy Publically Shared Things (Weapons, Armors, Races, Classes, etc)
into their own Worlds for adaptation and use for their Games, or publications. All things that are Shared Publically
on the Mythos Machine enter into the Mutual Collaboration Society Agreement which is a share and share alike
framework for GM Collaboration. You can make your cool things Public (or keep them private, whichever you wish) in
order to allow GMs to use them, and likewise you can use whatever other GMs have Shared from their Worlds in your own.
Two things were fixed in this release. There is now a new selection criteria that allows you to select viewing your
own Worlds in the list of Worlds, in case you have more than one World and you want to Share your own Things between them.
This, btw, does not include Purchased Worlds, which always retain copyright ownership by the author of those Worlds.
Secondly, you can also select to view only the list of Default Worlds in case you want to go back and restore things
in your World specifically from your root World (which would be like the Fantasy or Western Worlds).
There was also a backend issue with the database that was also resolved where I wanted to be able to root back to find
the original World that any given thing might have been shared and reshared from. I can now get that World easily as
well, which is something that will be useful in terms of tracking whose things spread to what Worlds throughout the system.
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May 14, 2019
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Character Things Distribution - Enhancement
The Characters Page now has a new button named "Transfer Things". This leads to the Character Sharing Things Page
which has two modes, one for Players and one for Gamesmasters. They're almost the same, except the Players can
only transfer things from their currently selected Character to another Character in their Adventure Group.
Gamesmasters on the other hand can select any Adventure Groups and any Characters for Transfers. The Things that
can be transfered are: Money, Armors, Weapons and Equipement. Of the Weapons and Armors only non-Body Weapons and
Armors appear in the list, so you can not transfer, let's say, your foot to another Character, but you can transfer
your money or a sword, or leather vest. This feature allows Characters to give / lend their things to other Characters.
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May 7, 2019
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Treasures Distribution - Enhancement
The Treasures Management page now has a method for distributing Adventure Treasures to Characters in any Adventure Group
that you have associated to the Adventure. Much needed and long time coming ... but it's there now, and works nicely.
The next thing to add in that regard is a method for allowing Players to distribute money and items to Characters in their
own Adventure Group. Coming soon.
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May 5, 2019
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World Weaver's Strategy Guide - Update
The Strategy Guide has been updated and is now simpler and more focused on what World Weaver's need to know
to build their own Worlds efficiently and effectively using the Mythos Machine.
The Guide can be found here:
World Weaver's Strategy Guide
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May 2, 2019
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World Marketplace - Update
The Worlds Marketplace has been updated and two Proto-Worlds are now for sale. This means that Marketplace GMs
(the freebie tier for GMs) can now purchase two existing Worlds in the Marketplace (for $3 each). This establishes the
Marketplace as a viable platform for World Creating GMs who want a unified online system to create Worlds, play them with
their Players, and offer them for sale to other GMs on the system.
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Apr 30, 2019
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Marketplace Worlds - Platform Owner Account Fix
As it turns out Stripe has certain restrictions on owners of platforms so that they are not allowed to use their
owner account to actually participate in the platform. Unfortunately, they fail to alter the platform owner of
this until after you've created your implementation and try it, and then it produces an obscurely worded error message
about a "Shared Account", which requires researching extensively through their documentation to figure it out. Aha.
Ok, so as it turns out, according to the Stripe Engineers who are on IRC, the platform owner, and only the platform owner,
has this error, and the solution is to create a separate stripe account to publish Worlds with. Ok. So that's been
done and now I can offer my own Worlds for sale on the Marketplace as well. Woot!
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Guild Class Names - Bug Fix
In the process of debugging the problem above, I discovered an obscure case where Guildclass names in the
Character Object did not match their names in the GuildClass table, and this caused some guild classes not to
be found for those Characters. This caused an error when cloning a World on World Creation. That has also
been fixed, both in the data, and the code.
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Apr 27, 2019
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Marketplace Worlds - Update
World Marketplace Code has been Improved. This is a very 'back-end' kind of fix, and only affected the
test system, but it was an important one for Beta Testers in order to avoid confusion. It allows the
system administrator to take a Proto-World and instantly create a Packaged World from it for the Worlds Marketplace.
Thus we can now Provide 'Marketplace GM' Tier members the ability to purchase Proto-Worlds as Packaged Worlds.
That is very helpful from an administrative perspective and will help us to launch our first Marketplace Worlds
on the Live System very soon. It also has the benefit of allowing all GMs on the system to try out and
experience the Proto-Worlds equally. Sweet.
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Apr 19, 2019
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World Things Search & Replace - Update
Added Character and World data to the Search and Replace.
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Anti-Hacking Provision - Preventative Fix
A small number of pages were subject to hacking by unscrupulous ne're do wells... that has been taken care of.
No attacks have been made, but this is a preventative measure, just in case anyone should try to be not-nice
on the site. Please note: Every action taken on the site is recorded, so be aware that it is likely that
bad actors will get caught, and permanently banned from participating in the site.
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Apr 18, 2019
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World Things Search & Replace - Enhancement
In the Search and Replace World Thing page you can select what aspects of your World to search, either the World Things
or Campaigns and Adventures, or both. When you do a search you will be presented with all instances
where the search term you entered is found anywhere in your World, and this information will be shown with an edit button
that will take you to the page for that Thing so you can edit it. Not only that, but you can choose to do a global Replace throughout
your entire World with one click. Note, if you select the "Case Sensitive" option for your search then only those items that fit the
Case of your search term will be highlighted in green, and if you do a Replace only those terms will be updated. If you choose "Not Case Sensitive"
then all of the matching terms will be updated regardless of case throughout your World. Please be careful with this feature. There is
no way to roll back your changes once you've done a Replace.
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Apr 12, 2019
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Character Image Handling Update
Improvements to the Character Descriptive Screen where you can now title the image, or not, depending on
your preference, and the formating of the page is a little cleaner looking in terms of the placement of
objects on the page.
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Apr 8, 2019
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Places Images & Maps Display Enhancement
Previously, on the Places page you would see a link with the name of the Image or Map that you have uploaded,
which when clicked would open the image in a new page and you would need to use the browser's back button
to return to the Places page. The new method gives you a clickable and nicely styled button that says "View Map" or
"View Image" and shows the image in a nicely formatted window within the current page, and provides a close button.
Not the most amazing update ever, but it's an improvement to the UI and makes MM a little nicer to work with.
-
Mar 29, 2019
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Character Print Options - Update Enhancement
Knocking it out of the ballpark with much more elegant CSS for printing to HTML. The pages can now be saved from
Chrome Browser to PDF (via Chrome > Print) with page breaks between Character sheets and an elegant black & white
print page. You can print one Character at a time, or an entire group at once.
When printing directly to Word Documents the formating is plain black & white for easy printing, and includes
an image of the Character if provided.
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Mar 27, 2019
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Character Print Options - Enhancement
Character Sheet printing now has two modes, one for Printing to Word Documents and the other to Print to HTML in the browser.
The latter has the advantage of not requiring MS Word, or similar software to be installed, and also allows, depending
on the browser, for the results to be exported to PDF using the browser's Save As feature (tested on Chrome currently).
In addition, when the "Print Descriptive" option is checked the Characters will print not only with their background
elements such as History, Traits, and so on, but it will now also include relevant information about the Character's
Culture, Race and Class.
- Thanks again to Chris Donovan for yet another marvelous recommendation!
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Mar 20, 2019
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World Things Holes Report - Enhancement
This is a new report that shows you all of the Armors, Weapons, Skill Books / Skills, Mystic Book / Mystic Powers that
you have associated for Races, Classes in your World so you can review them and identify which ones are missing details
you want to include.
To use the form select to look at either Races or Classes, and then either pick "Select All" from the drop-down, or
select the particular one you are interested in.
The Report is accessed from the Reports Page drop down list and is named "World Things - Holes".
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Mar 17, 2019
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Character Races - Enhancement
GMs now have the ability to associate both Skills and / or Mystic Powers to Races. To do so GMs can
create Skill or Mystic Power Books for specified Races, and then associate those books to the Races they wish.
Once done those Books will automatically assign the Race-Skills and / or Race-Powers to the Character when the
Character Class is changed by the Player or GM, as well as when the Characters are Auto-Generated in the
Generate Adventure Group Form.
In the Character Race and Character Class Screens you will also see the list of Skills and / or Mystic Powers
that come with any Books that are associate to the Race or Class as you've defined them. You can associate the
Books to more than one Race or Class.
So, for example, let's say you want all Undead to have not only certain Weapons and Armors (such as undead flesh, or
or whatever you think appropriate) but you can also add Undead Skills and Mystic Powers as well. So you would
create a Skill Book named, perhaps, "Undead Skills", and add whatever Skills you've created for this purpose, such
as, perhaps, "Night Stalking" or "Barrier Bashing". And let's say you want all undead to also have
a specific set of Mystic Powers for your World, such as "Chilling Gaze", or whatever. So you would create a
Mystic Power Book called, for example, "Undead Powers", and add "Chilling Gaze" to the Book along with
whatever other Powers you want. Lastly, for both, you use the Additional Item Options to associate the Books
to whatever Undead Races you want (let's say only Skeletons, Zombies and Ghouls get this set, but you have
a different set in mind for Vampires, and their ilk).
All of which provides a much greater level of freedom for GMs to create the Worlds they want and configure them
in any way they see fit.
- Thanks to Chris Donovan for yet another brilliant recommendation!
-
Mar 13, 2019
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Character Skills - Bug Fixes
Character Skills had two problems which are now fixed.
-
1. When first entering the page the Skills list did not filter the Character skills properly, so it was
possible to select a Skill that the Character already had learned.
-
2. When selecting a Skill in the Character Skills list, if the Available Skills list was empty,
then the selected Character Skill Information would not show up at the bottom of the form.
-
Mar 9, 2019
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Places Tree - Update
While deciding on the best and most useful information to be giving in the Treeview, there were two versions
in the Mythos Machine. It was decided that the one that provides more information is better and so all of the
Places Treeviews now show a color outlined indicator showing which Places have Campaigns and Adventures. This allows
the GM to quickly see where their World is currently filled out, and Places where they may want to do more work.
All Treeviews will also show if who is the Owner of the Place if it is not the World owner, as is the case in Shared Worlds.
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Mar 2, 2019
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Mystic Powers Filtering - Bug Fix
The filtering was not quite working correctly in the Edit Mystic Powers form. It now will filter allowing you to search
for all Mystic Powers by name, and a variety of other attributes. It is possible that other filters need similar
updates, so I will be going through the rest of the filters to ensure they are all working properly.
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Mar 1, 2019
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Mystic Power Books - Enhancement
Mystic Powers worked before by looking at the Character's class, whether its base is cleric and/or spellchanter and then
showing spells and miracles accordingly. It was not allowing the GM to create specific sets of spells and miracles
for specific classes of mystic. Now it does. So you can now create a mystic class like "Grey Warlock", and then create
a Mystic Book, like "The Book of Grey Magic", fill it with spells and/or miracles... and then when the player goes to
select Mystic Powers for their Grey Warlock Character, it will show the Book which is specific to their class. So now
it works exactly the same way as Skills.
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Feb 26, 2019
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Edit Things Forms - bug fix
The Edit Things forms, most of them, had missed a bit of code that is required for allowing the grid view on the left
of the screen to update the Thing (Weapon, Armor, Equipment, etc) name when the name is updated in the Details view.
That has been addressed now, and should work on all forms.
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Feb 21, 2019
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Campaign Sort Order - bug fix
My implementation of Campaign sort order had a bug, which occurred only if there were two campaigns with the same
sort order. That has been resolved.
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Feb 19, 2019
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Print World - Update
Working on further refinements to the Print Worlds feature. It now allows you to more cleanly print to PDF format from
the browser (Tested on Chrome only thus far).
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Campaign Sort Order - Update / bug fix
Campaign sort order had a simple text box, but was set to take and handle only numeric values. So now it will offer a
drop-down list of numbers, to avoid possible confusion. Earlier if a non-number was put in the textbox the application
would have errored when you tried to save. Better.
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Email Confirmation for Suspended Accounts - Update
For those who may want to suspend, but not delete their accounts, there is an option to do so. This way you can keep your
World(s) but not have to pay the subscription fee if you aren't going to be working on them for a while. No problem.
However, until today I was not sending out a confirmation email affirming that the account was successfully suspended.
I added that and so now you will get an email letting you know that the suspension went through and explaining that
you can re-Activate any time.
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Feb 9, 2019
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Print World - Update
Print Worlds now will sort Places by Name. Before this, Places were sorted by the order in which they were
created in the Mythos Machine, which is not necessarily convenient. Sorting by Name allows the World Weaver to
order their places so that they can do things like number rooms in a dungeon. Each level of the World Tree
will be sorted by name, so you can order things as you wish. For example:
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World of Logath
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Continent of Zilmara
- City of Quindara
- City Hall
- Occum Street Library
- Main Street Police Station
- Wilderness of Baroom
- Cold Forest
- The Northern Sand Traps
- The Blasted Plain
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Ruins of Tel'Jared
- 1. Hall of the Masters
- 2. The Inner Sanctum
- 3. The Library of Baal'zamar
- Continent of Arguna
- Continent of Mil
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Feb 8, 2019
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Print World - Update
Print Worlds now has two new options.
Print Plain Black and White: This will print the document in plain text without text colors, although the images
if you choose to output them to the document will be in color.
Show (or Hide) Place Level Names: By default Place Names will also print with their Place Level Name. So if you
defined
your Place Levels, let's say, as World, Continent, Realm, Kingdom, etc... and you print your Places tree from the top down
then
you would get the name of your World and in parentheses next to the name would read "(World)". If you had a continent named
Lemuria, then it would get printed as "Lemuria (Continent)", and so on. Now sometimes Place Level Names don't quite match
the Place Level. For example, you might have a place level named City somewhere down in your tree, but at that same level
is also a Dungeon. You don't want "Major Dungeon of Anlabad (city)"... so you might in that case leave off printing with
the
Place Level Names.
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Feb 3, 2019
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World Page Look & Feel
Update to the Worlds page configuration. It now allows you to go directly to the Things Management page from the Worlds
Page
by hovering the button Go To and clicking World Things. Earlier you had to go to the Administration Console
first, which made it feel a
bit confusing. Now it is more clear that Things are under Worlds.
In addition I cleaned up the way that the Expand boxes look, how they work, and their position on the page to make them
less prone to triggering the Question mark hover. Additional work on coloring now separates the sections a little more
clearly.
In addition the Images dialog box was centered horizontally and vertically with a better coverage of its space in the div.
While seemingly minor improvements, each of these small things adds up to a better user experience overall. As we move
forward
I will continue to make such improvements as may seem necessary and useful.
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Jan 29, 2019
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World Stores Management
Earlier versions did not allow the user to delete or modify the name of the General Store, or the Body Things store.
However, now they can be modified or deleted, however both of them are nevertheless required and will be
recreated if they are not found in any given World. The reason for this is because in some cases two of
either or both of these Stores could potentially exist (if the user inadvertently creates a duplicate)
and the former method did not allow the user to clean up this kind of mistake. So now, the user can manage
these stores more explicitly.
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Jan 27, 2019
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Data Cleansing - Updates to Things Reference Tables
Due to changes in the data, and methods of managing data along the development path, some of the older
Beta Worlds, and consequently some of the Default Worlds, had some data references that were mismatched
between Worlds. So if there was a GuildClass - Skill combination, in a few cases the Skill might be
from the wrong World. Routines were created to validate the data, and correct errors so that the
things will all match the World in which they are being used.
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Jan 14, 2019
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Bug Fix - Deleting Things Issue
There was an issue with the Things (such as weapons, armor, races, classes, cultures, etc.) deletion where references
to deleted Things remained with the Character, and when Armors, Equipment and Weapons were deleted Characters could still
have them.
While this was non-disruptive to the application in the sense that it didn't cause any errors, it did leave orphaned items
where
they didn't belong, and this had an effect on the quality of the underlying data, and also may have produced a few, albeit
rare,
cases of unexpected results for the Gamesmasters. Now, once a Thing is deleted it is completely removed from the World in
every aspect.
Both the code and the data have been cleansed of orphans and where necessary missing data was replaced.
At this point the Mythos Machine will alter the Characters that have associations either by deleting them
, or by
assigning a new value from the World, such as when a Class or Race is deleted. In this case the first Thing
in the list will be selected as a replacement. For example, if you have a Monk Class, and three Characters in
your World are Monks, when you delete the Monk Class, the three Characters will be assigned to Thief instead.
A further step will be to provide the GM a list of those things that will be changed when the deletion is completed,
in case they are not entirely aware of everything that might change. In addition, when something like the Race, or
Class are changed, instead of selecting the first Thing in the list as a substitute, the GM will be given an option
to change them to a specified Class.
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Jan 7, 2019
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Skills System Update - Enhancement
Simplification of the Mythos Machine Skills Organization. The original system was very flexible
and included three methods of organizing skills, a Generic, a Skill-Class, and a
Skill-Book-Class system.
While the system did work wonders, it was also a bit too easy to wind up confused if you mixed systems while creating Worlds.
So one system of the three, the Skill-Books-Class system, was chosen as the best fit between the
completely generic system, and the ultra simplicity (but somewhat less flexible) Skill-Class system. So now, you select
one or more books to add
Skills to, and then assign those books to be primary for specific Classes. For example, if you have
a Class of Tiger-Men Warrior-Priests, and you want to include both Fighting and Mystic Miracle Powers
as Primary Skills for that Class, then you would create a Book named "The Book of Tiger-Men Warrior-Priests"
and add whatever Fighting Skills and Miraculous Powers you want to make Primary for that Class, and then
add the Book to that Class in the options. This provides the most creative flexibility without the
hazard of becoming overly confusing.
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