Azrapse,

Thank you so much for this! I haven't gotten to play the game yet, but any role-player loves making characters. Your sheet makes it very fun! I'm not sure if people min-max this game, but I really like the step by step nature of the sheet that doesn't seem to encourage that. To me, it captures the feel of the game well. Thanks again!
Yours in fellowship,
Stephen "Trotter"

It's not a big deal, but maybe someone can help me out.

I've been using this since the begining, and I love it.

But this week it stopped working on my phone (HTC Evo).

It still works on my friends phone (exact same phone as I have), and I haven't done anything to my phone's settings (that I am aware of).

I've tried clearing the cache, deleting and reloading the page, and other similar things without any luck.

Does anyone have an idea as to why it stopped working on my phone or how I might get it to work again?

My iphone sometimes sets Safari to "Accept Cookies: Never" instead of staying at "From Visited". I doubt it's a cookie problem, but maybe one of your settings got changed without your knowledge or any action on your part. Just a guess.

I was just trying out the Builder. I agree with everyone else - it is phenomenal! It does make the character generation process very easy. Much easier than trying to remember what mixtures of races, virtues, etc that sounded appealing while reading through.

While playing around with the Builder, I noticed the following issues:

1. No Weapon Gear is displayed; Skills are fine. Now that Gear is separate from Skills, they need to be shown in case a character does not have all the weapons.
2. It appears there are some null value field names - "Missing:uifatigueTravel" and "Missing:uifatigueTotal" appear to be errors.
3. Skill ranks on the Character Sheet can be clicked on out of sequence (so ranks 1, 2 & 6 can be darkened). Visually this is not a problem - it's 3 ranks. But Markup will show that skill at 6th rank.
4. Rewards should be listed before Virtues. (Trivial, but thought I would mention it.)
5. Alter the Markup output order of Common Skills to imitate the Character Sheet, either by column or row. (A minor issue, but if manually comparing or editing Markup, it makes things easier.)
6. Add a title/label to the Dice Roller. (I had no idea what it was, how to use it, or whether I needed to use it at all for the Character Sheet.)
7. Add pop-up instructions to the Dice Roller.

First, thanks for the reporting of bugs and suggestions.
Let's talk about them

Hmm. During character creation, just before spending the initial XP on skills, the character gets a weapon for every non-Cultural weapon skill, and they are displayed on the Weapon Gear section automatically. If they decide they are not carrying one of those weapons, they can remove it.
If this is not what you are talking about, can you please explain again?

Where does that appear? I'm looking at the web sheet both in the english and spanish versions and I can see the labels for travel fatigue and total fatigue perfectly.

True. That was lazy from my part. I'll see it fixed.

...
Where? I see them to the left, while Virtues are to the right. I wonder if the character sheet is showing really messed up for you. I'm getting scared.

You mean the forum export? Okay. I'll try to do that. The problem with the forum export is that I can't easily create a table or a tabbed list for a forum post, so it's hard for me to make nice looking columns of skills. But I'll see what I can do.

Hmm, okay. I think once you know how to use it, the dice roller is really easy to use. But before that I agree it looks like a weird doomsday device. I'll try adding a couple of tooltips.

Thanks for your suggestions.

My apologies, originally I had a comment at the start about issues with the English version of the Export Forum Markup function - which I seem to have deleted later on. Without that comment the rest of my suggestions were not clear.

I think it will be easier to show you rather than trying to explain again. So I've included a public character's Markup as an example, anything I have altered is in red. Comparing the Markup to the Character Sheet you can see the points I mentioned in my original post.

I have added a few blank lines into the Markup. Mainly to avoid the text looking so heavy in certain areas. Or to make additional manual alteration easier for the user. However I did change the order of the material at the end of the character sheet (all of the stuff in the circles). I placed them in order from top to bottom.

Name: Kona <-- newline -->
<-- newline -->
Culture: Dwarf of the Lonely Mountain Standard of Living: Rich
Cultural blessing: Redoubtable Calling: Warden Shadow weakness: Lure of Power
Specialties: Smith-craft, Trading, Shadow-lore
Distinctive features: Determined, Suspicious
Body: 7 Heart: 4 Wits: 5
Body (favoured): 10 Heart (favoured): 6 Wits (favoured): 6 <-- newline -->
<-- newline -->
-Common Skills-

• Awe: 1 Inspire: 2 Persuade: 1
• Athletics: 1 Travel: 3 Stealth: 1
• Awareness: 1 Insight: 2 Search: 3
• Explore: 2 Healing: 0 Hunting: 0
• Song: 1 Courtesy: 0 Riddle: 2
• Craft: 3 Battle: 3 Lore: 1

-Weapon Skills-

• Mattock: 3
• Short sword: 1
• Dagger: 1

-Rewards-: Grievous, Fell
-Virtues-: Resilience
-Gear-

• Mattock enc: 10 edge: 10 inj: 20 enc: 2 <-- only added Mattock (weapon); mail and cap not altered -->
• Coat of mail enc: 16
• Cap of iron and leather enc: 2

Endurance: 33 Starting Endurance: 33 Fatigue: 15 Missing:uifatigueTravel: 0 Missing:uifatigueTotal: 0
Hope: 9 Starting Hope: 9 Shadow: 0 Permanent Shadow: 0 <-- newline -->
<-- newline -->
Experience: 0 Total Experience: 20
Valour: 3 Wisdom: 2 <-- changed display order of these lines, added newlines -->
Damage: 7 Ranged: 7
Parry: 5 Shield: 0 Armour: 4 Headgear: 1
<-- newline -->
Fellowship: 0 Advancement: 0 Treasure: 0 Standing: 0

#5 on my old list, should be ignored - I captured something weird (I'll send a copy by PM) and have not otherwise been able to duplicate the error.

February 18th, 2012

• Added a Total Shadow cell that is the sum of the values in the Temporary Shadow and Permanent Shadow cells.
• Fixed some errors in the Forum Code Export function. (Thanks, Garn!)
• Now you can download the chat history log in a html file.
• The Dice Roller has been labeled as such and now it has a help window explaining its usage.
• Skill ranks now automatically mark or unmark lower and higher ranks upon click.
• Fixed some errors in the character loading and row deletion codes.

The Dice Roller instructions are perfect - brief yet clear.

I noticed you changed the font and, to be honest, I have a mixed reaction to it. The font is the same one used in the official Character Sheet, but somehow it makes things look "busy". The smallest size is also difficult to read. I wonder if the iPad users can clearly read the sheet online? Maybe I just need a bit of time getting used to it. :shrug:

If you decide to keep the font, I would suggest the changes below. These are all about creating sufficient whitespace around the Character Sheet elements to improve readability.

• Move Favoured (on the Attributes) to the right - it's currently behind the circle.
• Move the Skill Groups to the right to make more room for Skills.
• Move the Skills 2nd and 3rd columns to the right.
• Move Weary through Wounds Treated upward to allow more space for Hope.
• Move Hope to the right a couple spaces.
• Increase the font size for Armour, Headgear, Shield and the related encumbrance. (You seem to have enough space without moving Endurance).

These are probably things you noticed already and did not have time to correct. Thought I would list them anyway, just in case.

The font change was not made yesterday, actually. It has been then for about two weeks already. However I will try something to increase readability on some devices.

Talking about devices, does anyone have any problem with the latest version of the sheet on mobile devices. After the changes made yesterday, my Android browser seems no to render the page at all. And I don't really know why...

Must have been a font substitution issue. I was reading a thread about fonts used in TOR and downloaded them. I guess that caused a change in the page display.

I'm still seeing Traits, Attributes, Rewards, Virtues, etc in Times New Roman. Should another font be displayed there?

Hmm. Yes. This is how the character sheet should look like.
I'm using several webfonts so maybe that's your problem. I'm adding an option to remove the Tolkien font and using the old one I was using, for better readability.

Yes, the Traits do appear in a different font (Times New Roman instead of Stonehenge / Kelt). Other than that, we seem to be looking at the same things. Here is what I'm seeing on your website:


Additional suggestions:

You might want to add an Abort option to creating a new character using two methods. An Abort Button on the Culture screen and pressing the ESC key at any time.

The Abort Button would require a change in how the Builder handles CS data. Currently the data is cleared immediately on pressing the Create Character button. I'm suggesting the data gets cleared once the Culture is finalized (ie, Next = clear old data and save new culture) only. Allowing a user to press Abort, instead of Next, which will return the user to the previously existing character. The ESC key would allow a user to leave the Builder at any time, clearing all data - old and new.

In some cases a description pop-up cannot display correctly (it "flickers" as it's being redrawn a couple times, then is not displayed at all) because the user is highlighting something in the middle of their screen. Perhaps alter the display function so that it can, on the fly, decrease the width of the pop-up, but increase height, wrapping text accordingly? (I noticed this with Beornings' Virtues and Rewards).


I hope that you don't mind that I keep making suggestions. Feel free to ignore, or consider alternatives, however you see fit. Nor am I in any rush to see suggestions implemented. I figure that anything that makes your CSB more user-friendly is a good thing for users and Cublicle7 / TOR. While it might be extra work for you, I appreciate the time and effort you have invested.

Hi Azrapse,

Have you altered something recently that would affect the printing? From Chrome, I get a first page that's mostly black, and the second page doesn't print at all.

From Firefox, it's better, but doesn't recognise that there should be a page break, so the top of the second page appears at the base of the first. Also, the font doesn't render when printing (though that has never worked for me).

Haven't tried IE yet (browser of last resort!).

Any thoughts as to what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks,

Dave

No idea, mine started to to the same thing about a week and a half ago after working just fine. It's just a blank white screen. If you figure it out, let me know!

I'd also echo the request for the return to the more standard/basic font for the skill section. It just seems too busy now.

Okay. I will remove all the fancy fonts if with that I can fix the mobile problem.
Stay tuned...

Many changes. I hope not many bugs.
Thanks Garn for the many suggestions.
February 21th, 2012

• Fixed the problem with mobile browsers not showing the page. Sorry!
  
• Print button removed. Use your browser's print command to print instead. Fixed the back background on the print preview in Chrome. (Still some glitches)
  
• You can now change the fonts in the page to the previous ones by clicking the Change Font button. It will remember your selection.
  
• You can now change how the popup descriptions of game items work.
  By default, when hovering the mouse over a game items, a little (?) button will appear next to it.
  Click on that button to get a window with the description of the item.
  Alternatively you can click the Popup Help Buttons button to change back to the classic popup tooltips.
  You can click the Popup Tooltips button again to remove any kind of popup help.
  You can click again to go back to popup buttons. The page will remember your selection.
• The Character Creation wizard has now bigger buttons to help using it in smaller screen mobile devices.
  Also, it has now a Cancel Creation button that will close the wizard and restore the character sheet you had before, regardless of in which stage of the creation you cancelled.
  Also, you can now press Enter for Next, Backspace for Previous and Escape for Cancel Creation.
• The What's New button will now be highlighted when there are changes you have not yet read about.
• The Dice Roller will show in the chat if the roll was made adding (or substracting) any modifier.
• Several cosmetic tweaks.
• Experimental new online feature: Synchronization.
  When you load an online character, you can enable the new Synchronize Changes button.
  While the button is enabled, all changes made to the character will be sent to the server.
  The program will check for changes from the server and bring them to update the sheet.
  This feature should be useful during online games where the same sheet is open by the Loremaster and the players.
  If both load the character from the server and both enable Synchronization, they will see eachother's changes appear automatically.
  Please understand that this feature is experimental and you may encounter some glitches. Please, report any bugs. Thanks!

Umm. Thank YOU.

I really appreciate all the work you're putting into this.

It's a pleasure. I'm actually using the sheet a lot myself for my online games so I'm really motivated to improve it as much as I can as an useful tool.

Little bugfix report:
In my zeal to remap the Backspace key (from the browser's default behavior of going back to the previous address) to the new behavior of being a keymapping for the Previous buttons in the Character Creation wizard, I accidentally also overrode the default behavior of... deleting text backwards. I have just fixed it. Sorry if it affected anyone meanwhile...

Here's a sizable bug... backspace key doesn't work. Tested and verified on Firefox, Android Browser, Firefox for Android, and iPad Browser. If you want to change any text based fields you have to highlight and retype.

Another bug: if you add a weapon skill, there is no way to remove it.

Unfortunately I have also found a couple small bugs.

• On the Culture screen, after selecting your race, the Builder does not accept Enter = Next. Instead it clears the chosen race (reset).
• Add a newline after Cultural Blessing, please. (This one is MY error I forgot to include it in my mock-up!)
• Remove a newline between Wits (favoured) and -Common Skills-; there is an extra one.
• Save as Code (JSON) has the skill "undefined"; could not determine correct skill.
• Weapon Damage is not being filled into the Damage / Ranged section. Is this due to player's choice of weapons?
• What's New highlighting & Pop-up Help button status is not being remembered between sessions.

Note: Retested the Enter button on the Culture screen and seems to be fine now. Maybe it was a cache issue?

(Edited to add Note)

This post has been edited by Garn on Feb 22 2012, 12:19 PM

Are you sure it doesn't still work? Try reloading your page while ignoring your browser's cache (That is, press Ctrl+F5). I just reported of fixing that bug in the post above yours. Please, report if the fix is not working for you...

About removing the weapon skill... You are right. I never though that once added anyone would have any way to loose a skill. However it could be added by mistake and then there would not be any way to remove it... I'll try to add the option to remove it.

Hmm, can't replicate here... Cache issue?

You mean in the forum markup? That's easy to solve. Sure.

I know, I know. I've been tracking that weird undefined for some months now. It is doing no harm to anything as far as I know, so I have not given it much focus. But it would be nice to know what's the origin of that.

I have never known what to put there since I first made this character creator back in August... Not even in the paper sheets I used to play once. I guess those cells are meant for the tengwar bonus (Great and Extraordinary Success damage bonus) . In Damage you put the Body attribute value, and for Ranged, the same, and the player has to change it depending on his or her particular set of virtues, weapons and blessings modifying what exact bonus you get with the tengwars.
That is my guess. But in any case it's hard to determine, for the program, which exact numbers should be put there. So I decided to leave them blank so that the players fills them up himself.

Hmm, can't replicate here... Cache issue?

These things are remembered with a cookie that never expires. If your browser has cookies disabled, or it is configured to delete cookies upon exit of the program, I guess it wont work for you.
Just for testing, try tryping something in the Username and Password fields in the Online Character Server window. If after reloading the entire page they are not there, then your browser is deleting the cookie.

Thanks for all the reports!!! Please, keep them coming.

There are still Weapon Gear vs Weapon Skill problems. Specifically:

• no way to indicate which weapons the character is carrying
• all weapon skills are currently adding Encumbrance

Add a checkbox next to the weapon's name and it can be used to indicate which weapons the character has in their inventory. So checked weapons are both Skill and Gear. Unchecked weapons are Skills only. Only checked weapons' Encumbrance is added to the Total Encumbrance. Although I say "add a checkbox", it could be anything: a checkmark, bubble, star, etc.

Does it even make sense to have Damage and Ranged fields? What I mean is if you add a "mod" field (modifier) which adds in any Rewards (and any other modifiers) to each Weapon Skill line, then these two fields might not be needed.

Ok, a bit HERO System here, but does it make more sense to add weapon Rewards, et al, directly to the affected weapon instead of listing them in the Rewards section? Add a text only comment line? (Just thinking out loud.)

Keep in mind that I still have not finished reading the rules.

(We've cross-posted. I'll take another look and get back to you shortly.)

Printing from Chrome still a little odd in places, but the blackness has gone and FF looks perfect! Thanks very much!

First off, I started by using Ctrl+F5 in Firefox 10.0.2 to reload the page. I wanted to make sure it was not my cache before double-checking the stuff below.

Cookies are enabled in FF, but I do not accept 3rd Party cookies. However, I use an add-on to manage cookies (always displayed) and according to it you're not requesting to send me a cookie. However, I am an anonymous user - no account, not logged-in. Which might be the issue.

Backspace worked correctly in comment fields. Backspace worked correctly in Character Creation.

Removing Weapons: I noticed this as well, but thought since you could add & delete rows that weapons might affect other calculations. I've simply deleted unwanted weapons. Add the row back in to enter a new one.

Enter: The Enter button is still clearing the selected Culture. Works fine everywhere else. I know just enough about programming to drive a programmer up a wall.... maybe you haven't defined / set a value until afterwards?

JSON: Sorry, I couldn't remember whether I mentioned it. I've had trouble matching it as well when I was comparing them. I did notice that the latest iteration of the CSB does show "undefined" (I think that was the word used) in fields where an entry is pending. So if you're in Calling Dialog, the Calling field on the CS shows "undefined" - but also on the Calling related Specialties. But I only see that word in the fields above Traits. Unless its some intermediate value being generated for Calling skills - before getting to the Common Skill screen - that is not being updated?

Buttons: I'm going to have to establish an account. Never did because it was kinda complicated and confusing. I'll get back to you on this one.

Fonts are enabled again? I see Stonehenge / Celtic font again as per previously posted image.

Does anyone know what I have to do to get the Stonehenge font (which I have installed) to print as Stonehenge rather than (I think) Times New Roman? Is it to do with the print CSS?

Okay. My fault.
I checked the Enter and cookie problem in Chrome and Safari and it worked fine. Of course, it seems to work on all Webkit browsers. I checked afterwards in Firefox and Opera and it behaves as you have been reporting. I'll research what's the problem there... Sorry for misleading you before. The popup and what'snew cookies were incorrectly being created as Session only, instead of never expire. Sigh...

Removing weapons is already done in the development server, but it'll have to wait to go to the public one until the rest of the issues are fixed.

I'm a little bit confused about your comment. The sheet currently has Weapon Skills and Weapon Gear clearly separated. Weapon Skills don't add any Encumbrance.

I think the intention of the author is that the listed weapons are the weapons the character is currently carrying. If he doesn't carry a weapon he would delete the row.
Of course we may want have a character that owns several weapons but don't have them with him...
I think I will do as you propose and add a Carried checkbox to every Weapon Gear row. Maybe also to the Armor Gear rows.

I think I prefer leaving those two cells. They can be useful for someone as a reminder for the modified Body bonus for their particular character. It makes no sense to add a field to every weapon gear row repeating the same value as in this cell. Instead of that, we have that cell already.

In respect of the Rewards modifying a weapon, that's what comments are meant for. Add a comment to your Rewards stating which weapon they are attached to. Other than that, it would overcomplicate the sheet too much. I'm not making the new Neverwinter Nights here (so far ) so, for the moment, I think I'll put a low priority on that one.

About the JSON secret undefined property of mysteries, it's solved. I won't go on details but it was doing no harm other than adding few extra bytes to the JSON representation of the character sheet.
The undefined values that temporary appear in the character sheet during creation (as well as the NaN values that appear down in the Hope and Endurance cells) have to do with the program trying to render a complete sheet out from an incomplete set of character selections. Don't pay much attention to them.

About the fonts, both for Garn and Thriddle questions, I'm aware that some of the fonts used in the webpage reject being printed as they are flagged as web-only. The only workaround is me going out and picking other fonts that allow for printing.

Printing in Firefox works wonderfully. In Opera it looks uglier, but acceptable. In Chrome it looks awful. Why they look so disparate, I don't know. I guess printing CSS is not my trade, but I'll keep on trying to make it look better in Opera and Chrome.

Azrapse,

Yeah, that Character Server was confusing. I'll post some suggestions once I can think a bit more clearly.

1. Button State: It appears things are fixed. Between my lasts two posts I closed the CSB tab, reloaded the page (including another Ctrl+F5) and saw What's New was gray.
2. Fonts:
   • NoScript (a Firefox add-on which prevents lots of potentially abusive programming functions - allows per site whitelisting and blacklisting) was blocking font display. Now we both know. Normally I lock everything down and whitelist sites as needed - but you're my first font using site.
   • Currently I see the same fonts your previously uploaded image displayed; additionally a hand writing font is used for the right hand menu and character creation dialogs. Still looks busy. I thought you reverted the fonts back?
3. Weapon Skill vs Gear: Aaah... What can I say, I think I kinda lost my mind in the testing and the cross posting. Despite what I was seeing, I was still kind of mentally putting the Skill pips by the Gear. My apologies for wasting your time.
4. Enter Key: Oh good! At least this one doesn't only exist within my mind. I was starting to worry.

Greetings thriddle! May I offer you a giggit larvae?

Unfortunately it is all that I can do for you. For I am lacking in knowledge of both chrome and CSS. Recent experience can only provide but a drop of wisdom - for I believe NoScript is available for chrome - and therein may you find where your difficult lies if you have made use of it.

Thanks for the response, Azrapse. I see now what the problem is, and no worries.

Garn, the giggit larva is a very thoughtful gesture. Do be careful though. As I'm sure you're aware, the insidious cleash practically *infest* the East Trinnu Jungle Lands.

First a quick question: Different stat boosts you get from Virtues or Rewards (like for example the +3 Endurance boosts from King's men) doesn't automatically get calculated on the sheet, right?
Just want to make sure because it's easy to get complacent and forget to add those changes yourself.


Secondly a design suggestion: Switch the cancel character creation button to the far left of all the other buttons. There are two reasons for this.
The first is since the majority of people in the western world read from left to the right, people instinctively see things on the far right as the next part of a progression.
The second is that it is now very easy to miss click the cancel button unintentionally. Both for the above reason and because it's easy to miss the next button and hit cancel when the next button pops up between the previous button and the cancel button.

The only thing that automatically affects how the program calculates endurance is the Redoubtable dwarven Cultural Blessing. No Virtues or Rewards are considered by the program.

About the buttons, all good points.

It seems that Firefox can't just print the fonts if you have not downloaded them first, even those fonts that aren't flagged as webonly.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=468568#c38

I'm using a couple of fonts from Google Web Fonts that don't even seem to be printable by any browser. They are the fonts that I use for the menus and everything. If you have suggestions for alternative fonts, please tell me about them.

Otherwise I think I will use fonts as close as possible to those in the book. I like the idea of the web character sheet looking close as the book character sheet does.

February 24th, 2012

• Added Carried checkboxes to all weapon gear and armor gear rows. When marked, that gear is considered to be carried by the character, and its Encumbrance value will be added to the Fatigue. When not marked, it is owned by the character but left at home or carried by a mule.
  When you load your character for first time after this change, you will have all gear off. Just mark the ones you want to carry back on.
• You can now remove a weapon skill without removing the whole row.
• Cosmetic change: Next button will appear always to the right. (Thanks, Chryckan)
  Cosmetic change: Fixed black page printing in Chrome.
  Cosmetic change: Changed all fonts to printable ones. Because of an unfixed bug in Firefox itself, you can't get the webfonts printed in that browser. They have to fix that.
• Fixed page not rememebering Font selection or What's New read status.
• Fixed backspace not working on text fields, or Enter not working on the Culture Selection window.

VERY NICE! Just when we thought it couldn't get any better

Wow. This is fantastic! Thanks so much.

One (maybe final!) request. Could you make the total Encumbrance and total Fatigue fields manually editable, so that we can delete the figures there if the sheets are to be printed out and used manually? Not all the players at my table have iPads, etc., so at the moment I have to print to PDF and then patch the file.

But this is wonderful. Thanks again.

Alright, I'm taking a shot at the Character Server.

First impressions count - unfortunately mine was confused and overwhelmed. I only mention this so you understand my approach to these suggestions - which can be summarized as "start from scratch". Here is a mock-up of what I imagine:

The Character Server dialog is trying to provide access to lots of dis-similar tasks all at once. Resulting in a confused user. The boxes, around sections of the dialog as well as the buttons, are not helping since they're making things look busy. So in my mock-up I've tried to limit the number of boxes.

I moved all of the buttons to the right side of the dialog to mimic the menu on the right of the CSB. The buttons might still be an issue, but at least they are better organized with text headings so users can immediately understand their functions.

I placed the Instruction button in the upper right, easily seen and colored a very pale green. Notice it is set roughly equal to the height of the intro text on the left. Too high and the button is competing with the dialog name, too low and it may not be as noticeable.

To keep the Instructions really obvious, I left space between the Instructions vs the Create Group button. The Character and Gaming related buttons are next to the window. (I should mention that I have not used any of the chat related features so perhaps my interpretation is not correct or appropriate.)

The Close button should probably be moved downward. But after moving stuff around on a per pixel basis, I said the heck with it!

Getting back to the dialog name, I colored the background brown and used white text. This should let users know where they are in the website but more importantly to distinguish between the dialog's name and the buttons. (Yes, the first time I was playing with the CSB portion of the site I did click on the title.) I chose a medium brown to pick up the logo color. Whatever you do here, you might want to repeat in the CSB.

There is one major catch to this layout. It assumes that you can re-use the window to display both the characters and the instructions, as needed.

BTW, why is the Group Characters button blue?

You are right. The Online window does a lot of different stuff. I added more and more controls to it as I was adding features. I admit it was in need of a total overhaul of its layout.

The Group Characters button is blue because of a mistake I made. I will fix that in next version.

I like your layout. A lot of thanks for the mockup of it and the suggestions. You are contributing a lot to improve this program.

You're welcome, I actually enjoy doing end-user testing and documentation at my own discretion. But far more importantly, Thank You for all your hard work.

I've been looking at the actual text Instructions and trying to come up with viable, brief and thorough content. Challenging comes to mind. I'm wondering if it might not make more sense to split the character stuff from the gaming / chat stuff. Except that access wise, private characters might make more sense to be included with the gaming. The same general dialog layout could be used for both (except the "sign-in", see below). However as I still have not used these features I'm not sure if this would disrupt usability / game flow.

I was also thinking about instructions for the CSB. Basically a more gentle way of getting into and using the website without creating a sprawling mess of pages / dialogs. The only thing I could come up with was something like the following web page design idea (no idea how viable the programming would be)

And then adding a button to the top of the menu which causes the Instructions to be re-displayed as the user desires. This would provide users with instructions the first time they visit, but allow returning users to build characters instantly - without extra action on their part.

All of the above raises the idea about creating a one time "Register" function. Basically you would separate the Group Name, Group Password and Create Group programming functions to a separate dialog which is used once to set the user's cookie. You might want to add a Change Password function. This would appear below the Instruction button, in the menu on the right, with a small gap and then the Create Character button, etc.

Wow this was, originally, such a short post. I've got to remember not to think while posting.

February 28th, 2012

• Added a tutorial to the Online Server. Your first time there will open by itself. Next time you can open it by clicking on the Instructions button. (I will add more tutorials for other areas in the future)
• The Online Server window has seen its layout changed. Thanks Garn for the suggestion.
• Added a new button to the main menu to hide all volatile cells for printing. The volatile cells are those whose values are prone to change often during a game or after character development and you would like them being blank for printing. Thanks Thriddle for the suggestion!
• All characters stored in the server are now viewable by anyone.
• Internet Explorer 9+ is now fully supported!

Ah, that's a cunning idea. Thanks very much!

So, my friend uses his iPad when we play and he's having quite a bit of trouble with the current fontset, it seems. This is the "better" of the two, from his perspective.

Here's a screencap of what he sees on the site as of 2/29/2012