March Beta Release in Test

[RosenMcStern]

Hello all,

Please allow someone who does this job for an entity that is "slightly" bigger than SmiteWorks to chime in.

Damned and others have a point. There are objective difficulties for developers to keep their rulesets up to date with the current "weekly update" development model. SmiteWorks could make some improvements, such as:

1. Documenting CoreRPG. The basic functionalities of FG are well documented with a state of the art tool (Confluence). However, a lot of the work for a ruleset developer involves interacting with the framework, and not the application. I have no problem with reverse engineering CoreRPG to understand it, but the average developer may not have the time to investigate what is already possible and ends up overwriting functionalities that he might extend, and thus having his code broken by updates.

2. Implementing Long Term Support. At the moment the lifecycle of a version of CoreRPG is between one week and one month, without any public plans for when a release that may break derived rulesets will appear, and little hope that backwards compatibility can be enforced unless you duplicate all of CoreRPG in your stuff. Allowing to specify a LTS version of CoreRPG as dependency would alleviate some of the pain. SmiteWorks could provide support for one LTS version at a time, ceasing maintenance in one year or when a replacement is available. This is the standard practice for most open source frameworks, and would give developers the ability to plan the inevitable refactoring effort instead of suffering it passively.

3. Make CoreRPG available on a public versioning tool. All of the above would be facilitated by giving read access to the Git repository for CoreRPG. As the doc is on Confluence, I imagine the source is on BitBucket, which would support free access if allowed. In this way it would be easier for developers to try their rulesets on newer or older versions of CoreRPG before releasing, reducing malfunctions and frustration.

However, please allow me to say a couple words to the independent ruleset developers, too. I think they should meditate a little bit on some subjects.

A. Why are there fewer rulesets for Fantasy Grounds? To be honest, I disagree with some comments. FG has a lot of supported rulesets, both official and forgey. A great deal of what you see available for Foundry is unfinished and/or not maintained, and about what "support" in Roll20 implies we have already commented: a character sheet. The big reason why people are happier to work on Foundry is not that the framework is incredibly more stable or easier. The point is that on Foundry you work with TypeScript and CSS, tools that a good 50% of real world developers already master. Lua is not so widespread. SmiteWorks has no way of bridging this gap, so it is not productive to pressure Doug to change priorities on which SmiteWorks has already made its decisions: the factors that may make FG more popular in the future are others.

B. Embrace change. The work that SmiteWorks is doing to reduce technical debt in the framework is positive for independent rulesets, not negative. A correct use of inheritance and Liskov's substitution principle in your ruleset code will do wonders, but it requires that you accept to do some refactoring at the same time SmiteWorks does its job. My ruleset has survived the latest big updates with little or no impact, but only after I had refactored it so that it extended the features of CoreRPG instead of overwriting them. SmiteWorks is moving in this direction, and it is a good direction. Follow their lead.

[Jiminimonka]

Xcore (and MoreCore) are great at adding rollers to a standard character sheet. Not so good if you want to change the look or location of fields to the character sheet unless you code an extension.

I find they make it easier to add the rolls you need, but I have not found them better than CoreRPG if you want to move the blocks around to more closely match the official character sheets. I am thinking more of a painter where you could do limited layout of the sheet and then add the rollers.

Moon Wizard said (elsewhere on the forum) that Character Sheet standardisation is "next" on his list.

[LordEntrails]

FYI, I moved my query and the great responses to a new thread in the Workshop. I felt it was valuable enough to break out of this thread and capture in it's own. Those posts are moved here: Using Substitution Principles in FG (fantasygrounds.com)