The Mortar Pit

Its really funny how that old cliche "you don't know what you have until its gone" continues to ring true. In my case, its more I didn't realize how much stuff I actually did on my old laptop until it finally gave stopped working. I did almost all my conversion work on it, moving to the main computer occasionally. Generally, any image work tended to be on my main rig as it was far more capable than the old laptop for that stuff.

Needless to say, after the death of that 8 year old laptop my work basically came to a crawl. Really the only work I got accomplished until the arrival the new laptop was finishing off the few remaining tidbits of the Weird Wars Rome theme I had been plugging away on. Also, I completed some fixes to the WWR modules themselves. Some of the pregens were missing skills, some had missing edges and hindrances, and there was a piece of mundane gear that I had missed. The fixes to the modules will pushed to SmiteWorks for upload into the system tonight or tomorrow.

The theme will have to wait until 3.2.0 goes live, as it is actually not 100% compatible with the current version. There are some rather significant changes to the way the sidebar is structured and organized, and a couple even have been renamed under the hood to align with the CoreRPG rule set.

Anyone that played in the recent one shot by +Eric Lamoureux would have had the chance to see the theme. Although, since then it has gone through a couple of changes - for the better.

To be fair, a lot of the work in this theme was originally done by +Eric Lamoureux about two years. He ran into issues with a font he was trying to use and the anchor points of various windows and frames due to that font. He actually dropped work on it, when he moved from running a WWR game to some other stuff. Once I started work on the conversion of the modules, Eric was kind of enough to send it along to me and gave me permission to use whatever I could from the work.

I don't like reinventing the wheel if I don't have to. So I took that theme and puttered away at making it work. Sidebar buttons got a couple upgrades over the course of the work. Frame definitions got a few changes, as well as all the graphics used to make the various frames got new looks. +Gonzalo Durán provided some helpful feedback on the look of the character sheets, as well provided a script to enable Sanity as a derived stat. I took that script and worked into the theme so that it auto populates on character generation, but players will have to update in game when their sanity goes up and down.

So thanks to you both for the advice and assistance in making this theme work.

The first image is the desktop see when you load into the rule set with the theme enabled.

Attachment 14966

The next image shows the original character sheet, in this case right after I got the Sanity derived stat scripting sorted out. I happen to be a big fan of that character sheet, it just didn't fit with the rest of theme. Every other frame is similar in appearance to the chat window.

Attachment 14967

The character sheet now likes what you get in image three alongside the combat tracker, the chase tracker has the same look as well.

Attachment 14968

So this theme will be uploaded once 3.2.0 goes live and will get pushed out as an update, there will also be a portrait pack bundled with the modules as well. I just need to get it uploaded too.

Winter Eternal was submitted on 18 July, so its just the waiting game for it to makes its way through the review process. I am going to be doing a theme for Winter Eternal as well. Just takes me a bit, I have a lot on the go and I am absurdly non gifted in the arts department.

As for the next project, I have actually a few different works started. I have begun working on all of the plot point campaigns and savage tales that Pinnacle published, as well I have started work on The Last Parsec. The Archetypes pdf has already been completed with tokens (less than 24 hours real time start to finish on that one). Work on the CORE has progressed to the point I already have the entire first chapter converted. I am going to push myself to see if I can get this done in a week.

I am always open to suggestions as to what the next project should be. For the moment, I have been looking at products I already own otherwise it will be a bit of a slower process as I acquire the material to convert, which is why for example I started The Last Parsec vs High Space. I am not at the point yet where the product gets provided by SmiteWorks (and frankly I have too much fun doing conversions to care)

As always comments and flames are welcome.