Topic: Director's Briefing - April 2024

[NicholasHMCaldwell]

Welcome

To the one hundred-and-fifty-third Briefing and fourth scheduled Briefing of 2024.

Dragonmeet 2024

In the last briefing, I mentioned that I had placed our order for tables at Dragonmeet within ten minutes of the bookings opening. And an incredibly good thing I did so. Every single table at Dragonmeet was sold out within a week. Fastest ever. The organisers are now trying to see if they can find a bigger location for the 2025 show, which is likely to be no easier than it was last year or the year before.

To remind you, Dragonmeet 2024 will be at Novotel Hammersmith in London on Saturday 30th November. GMs wanted to run Rolemaster and HARP demo games.

Rolemaster

Nick has been implementing residual fixes to Treasure Law. An interim update of the pdf is likely. Please report any residual issues as we will soon need to proceed towards the print masters.

Nick has also circulated a new Creature Law layout draft version. It’s not yet ready for the formal series of iterative passes but that will come.

Software – ERA, Roll20 and AutoHARP

Every so often various antivirus software packages report false positive alerts on the ERA software. At least one of the reasons for this is that antivirus software is sensitive to software that is packaged as a self-extracting executable. From now on, ERA in its Windows version will be packaged as a .zip file - hence you will need to use the Windows built-in unzip facility or a third-party software to uncompress the file. We hope that this reassures the antivirus packages.

Our RMU incarnation for the Roll20 virtual tabletop continues to make progress.

AutoHARP was ready in February, I held off uploading it to ensure a correct listing, and then David had a “Columbo” moment of “just one last thing”. This “one last thing” morphed into sorting out a new HARP Bestiary dataset at the same time. As soon as David has reassured himself that everything is as he and his beta testers expect it to behave, then I will upload the new AutoHARP edition.

HARP

Not finished yet on HARP Steampunk, but still no need to nudge Phil Masters for him to make any corrections.

I will be doing a round of checking on how other authors are getting on with their respective adventure module drafts.

Until next time

Please stay safe and keep gaming.
Best wishes,
Nicholas

[DavidKlecker]

For AutoHARP it was more about recognizing that Version 3.1 will have a major database change and I would not force that on people and rather just put the database changes in now and get it out of the way. The database changes were the complete elimination of two xml tables. This was recognized by one of my beta testers who asked the hard question of why I do things the way I do. Because of him I recognized that two of my XML tables can be merged into my items table. Unfortunately that required a lot of testing to ensure that change worked.

I'm just waiting on confirmation that it installs. The reason this is important is because my machine is not a good testing site for a general public field test. Beta testers do not have the applications I have installed on my machine. AutoHARP3 does install fine on my computer but I really want to know if it installs on a few more machines.

[EvilWilliam]

GMs wanted to run Rolemaster and HARP demo games.

Is there any route to apply for this?