Hmm.
I remember we made some adjustments specifically for iPad for the previous two fonts that were replaced. Maybe those are not necessary now and they should be removed.

Did you get to try the page before changing the fonts? Where the numbers centered back then?
What about those ugly grey lines that appear wherever a text input is? Is that appearing in every webpage in an iPad or it started appearing now after the font change?

Can you please try again now? Please post a screenshot if you can. I just changed some things in the style sheet for iPad that maybe helps.

I just took some screenshots on my iPhone, if you're interested. I tried the Atomic Web browser to see if its ability to identify itself as a desktop browser would make a difference, but after trying different emulations I really didn't see any.
If you'd like to see just pm your email to me and I'll send the iPhone safari shots right over. I think it works really well, especially since I doubt you had the iPhone in mind when you designed this.

Thanks for your work. I love it!

Stephen "Trotter"

Sure. I´m interestend on making this work on as many devices as possible. That was the point of making it a web page.

Just an honest comment:

I don't like the Temporary/Permanent split on Fatigue and Despair... I think it makes the sheet look cluttered, ugly and stupid (for lack of a more diplomatic word).

Other than that I love your work and really admire the effort you put into this.

Keep it up!

/wolf

Hmm...
I may agree on cluttered and ugly. I can't understand why stupid.

It has not been until I have had to actually play the game that I have realized what others suggested in the first place.

Regarding Fatigue, there are two very different kinds of Fatigue: Encumbrance and Travel Fatigue. Noting them down in the same cell makes the player/lore-master have to mentally tell apart which amount comes from encumbrance and which comes from travelling when it comes to resting. It is confusing to have to mentally add up the encumbrance ratings from the gear weapons and armors to find out how much Travel Fatigue the character has to get rid of to go back to initial status.

The same applies to shadow. The book says that it should be noted down as X/Y, with X being the temporary rating and Y the permanent rating. But this is a digital document, so to speak, and every meaningful value should go to a certain distinct cell so that they can be treated by the computer independently, instead of having to guess whether the user has entered a slash in the middle of the cell or not.
If you consider that there are too many little circles around the Hope and Shadow cells, that's true. And I can try making them less cluttered. But I really think it makes sense, for both usability and data identity perspective, to keep temporary and permanent ratings separately.

I gave this a try the other day - is there a way to just enter values by hand without going through all the character creation process?

Id like to be able to assign my own cultures, blessings, traits, etc(free text even).

Is that impossible? or an easy change?

I hear you friend. And I understand.

This is just a case of preference, where I'd prefer to keep track of the stuff in some off-line note instead, just to keep the sheet from looking like a mess gone wild...

I'd leave it to the LM to keep track of what's what. Me as a player shouldn't have to care all that much. The only thing I need is the "how close to Weary am I?" kind of stuff... and for this the extra boxes brings no value.

But I will not argue this further, I see your point.

/wolf

I want to make a tool that is both useful for players and loremasters, mate.
The only thing I can think of is adding some button on the main menu that toggles the sheet view between Lore-master View (current one) and Player's View (one showing only the essential cells, with all inputs made read-only; a "Look but don't touch, stupid" mode , so that the player can make decisions but it's the Lore-master the one who alters the sheet.

Well... I wonder, in the first place, what use would you have for this Character Generator page if you want not to use the Character Generator at all and only want a blank sheet to fill it up at your own will.
But for that... the game already comes with one.

LOL I was thinking that as well.

Dionysius' point is valid, as I tried the other day to generate using your tool the Elven-King's Huntmaster (a Loremaster character), his name is Valsir and although an Elf of Mirkwood he has the Dunedain ability (see the Dunedain pdf done by one of the fans) to determine what creatures have been through a particular area). I forget the name of the ability, but of course your tool would not let me add a new Cultural Virtue....

Robin S.

Okay. Now I get it. So it seems the problem is that the sheet doesn't let you generate a character for a custom (or customized) culture.
Unfortunately I have no easy way to add a "Culture Editor" to the program to let you add your own cultures. That would require deep changes both in the client and in the server because:

- The Client requires the cultures to be standard so that their words can be translated to the different languages the client supports. Of course this could be hacked into skipping the whole translation thing, but it would still be a hack and it would make it totally incompatible with the Character Server part; because the characters are not stored as a bunch of text, but as a bunch of references to different game concepts (cultures, weapon skills, virtues, etc) to allow a more compact and language-independet representation of them.
- The Server should prevent the user from saving a "custom culture" character online.

I guess I could add an option in the Character Generator to let you freely pick any value for any field. That is, any culture, then any weapon skill package (that is, any 2 weapon skills + dagger?), any 4 favourite skills, any 2 specialties, any 2 distinctive traits, any calling, any attribute ratings, any virtue or reward...
But still it couldn't let you choose any non-standard (custom) value. For example, you couldn't select Dúnadan because the official stats for Dunedain have not been published by Francesco and I have not added them to the internal database. So in the end, if you want to still be able to use the extra stuff in the program, you could, at most, generate some kind of hybrids of the existing cultures, not entirely new things.

I guess, in the end, the easiest thing would be letting you type whatever you want in any cell. Transforming the whole sheet in just a plain form to fill up. Then you could be able to do as you wish. But that would prevent you from using any other functionality in the program (Save, load, export to forum). And then I see no point on using this program for that. A paper sheet would allow you to do the same, you can fold it and save it in a drawer, load it back from your drawer into your table, and it doesn't require a computer to work.
Before I start working on making any of that possible, I prefer hearing from you if it would be worth the effort anyway...

Azrapse,

In response to your question, yes, ultimately it is in the best interests of the WCB website / program to allow both scripted and manual data entry (without lookup or validation) to the character sheet.

I'm unaware of TOR's success as a product vis-a-vis other paper RPGs in today's market. But assuming it is at least a success (no G runes rolled ), then this specific feature request is going to be repeated. Particularly if MERP and LOTR gamers try to bring their campaigns over. Changes in the game mechanics may be of little concern. However altering someone's beloved character is another matter entirely. While TOR might be expanded to include official versions of today's custom cultures who is going to convince those players to wait until they are available?

While your post addresses all of the concerns and issues, there is one aspect you missed. Online game play of a custom culture cannot reasonably be handled by taking a custom CS out of the drawer. But then, it cannot be synced as it cannot be saved. Emailing the Fill-able Form CS.pdf back and forth might work, but it is not nearly as streamlined.

I guess I could spend one or two months developing a Game Customizer that:

• Lets you define a new Culture from the ground up (name, weapon packs, backgrounds, virtues, rewards).
• Lets you define new Weapons and Weapon Skills.
• Lets you define new Specialties and Distinctive Traits.
• Lets you define new Callings, along with new Shadow Weakness and corresponding Degenerations.
• Lets you provide translations for all of that to different languages.
• Lets you publish all of this online as a Custom Module Pack, in the server.
• Lets you link your Character in the main site to one or several Custom Module Packs, to have the customizations available during character generation and later play.

As good as it sounds, experience has taught me something:

• Only 1% of the users of the main site will even bother to open the link to that Game Customizer.
• More than 99.9% of the users that try the Game customizer will think "Screw this" after looking at it. Then they will use a simple Google Docs document to have an online shared character sheet (a text document or a spreadsheet) with 100% freedom to do everything.
• I bet I can make a Google Docs text document that mimics a TOR character sheet without any functionality in one tenth of the time it would take for me to do all of the things above.

If people want to be able to put whatever they want into every cell (things that are official, or custom, or that they invent at the moment) there is no point on a Character Generator to hand-hold them. Or at least I can't find any reason for it from my limited programmer's mind.
Maybe the best cost-effective solution would be adding a button to the site to export the character sheet to a Google Docs document. What do you think?

Hmm.
For me the great thing about your page is the layout.
The character creation is utterly awesome though (even though i'm not using it in my game.)

If you made that "game customizer" it would never end... I am using a smaller "base" set of skills and allowing 20pts of upgrade at the end instad of 10.

and lots of other "little" tweaks.

honestly, if you could make a google doc version of the sheet it would probably be a) easier for you and more usable to outlying cases

I cannot speak to Google Docs, but there is the Form Fillable_TOR Character Sheet.pdf floating around somewhere in the Forum. I cannot recall whether the link is in someone's signature or it was a topic-only link.

There are some character sheets available in the Pinned Resources by Jon Hodgson. But, if you can't find what you're looking for, here are a couple of links:

TOR_Character_Fillable
TOR_Character_v2 This is the second sheet Francesco put out, but it is not fillable.

Thread Necromancy! Rise from your grave!

Actually, the "Save Character as Code" button works as a crude sort of customizer. I just hand-rolled a Dunedain character for one of my crew (using Diogo's "Dunedain of the North" file for the rules. Nice work, guy. Thanks.). Then I used a duplicated text file of a regularly generated web-built character as the template, and just replaced the old values with the Dunedain characters values. It loads fine.

So, now I should be able to use the Character Builder to update the hand-rolled non-standard character just as easily as a regularly generated character. It's a bit more complicated, but not much.

Wow. You hacked a "gamesave".
You know that you have done something when people start hacking it.
I feel honored!

Does that dunedain culture add new traits or virtues? Or it just reuses existing ones from the current game? Because if it is the latest, I could easy add a Restrictionless Mode that lets you select any thing for any culture.

I've been meaning to dig this thread out!

We used the character generator for a couple characters at home, but I've had a heck of a time getting them printed. I've tried a couple different IE's (9 and 10), Firefox, and Chrome, and all have tricky spots.

IE and Chrome both want to print four pages instead of two. The last row of equipment goes over to another page.

Firefox is the best so far, but the last row of weapons overlaps the first row of equipment (armor). Also nothing seems terrifically centered, all the numbers are off center in their circles.

Is there a font I need or anything? I've tried with both the available fonts.

Thanks!

It reuses a couple of the standard ones, and adds a few, but most of the new ones are just slight reworkings of old virtues.

The "restrictionless" mode would be cool though.

Nice catch Matchstick. Printing was something I did not try at all.

This is most useful! Thank you!

Has the server stopped working for anyone else?

I'm getting syntax errors back from Chrome (unexpected token) and IE (invalid character) when I try to download my character.

I'm using FF 11.0 (Update pending) and I got through fine.

I tried again, using Control + F5 to make sure I was loading from the server and not cache. Here I did get a pop-up warning about the server not being available. An instant later the fonts updated the screen and I re-clicked on the Server button - and got through.

While the program is establishing variables and initiating things during loading, there is a period where the program cannot provide access to certain features. After loading is completed everything should work fine. The exact time frame probably depends on the user's system hardware - maybe a minute, max.

Nope. No luck. Still not working.

It's not working on my android phone either (which is running completely independently from my PC). The phone's giving me "unexpected token: illegal".

Both were working on Tuesday.

I've updated to Firefox 12.0 and everything is fine (cache loading and CTRL+F5 loading - allowing a minute for everything to load).

However, I loaded up IE 8.0.6001.18702 (which might be an older version) and waited a few moments to allow everything to load. However, something is not correct.

First, the layout of the Sheet is a bit different, but I assume this is more browser specific programming issues and not errors. (Example: The Hope, Body, Valour boxes in FF are round-cornered squares, almost ovals. In IE, they're perfect squares.) Other issues are:

• skill bubbles having a black smudge (shadow?) underneath
• The Skill Group names are cut-off on the right by 2-3 pixels
• Other positioning issues with text appear but I'm assuming its a 'best fit' situation
• Encumbrance's text labels appear to be misaligned as the ligatures and extenders from different lines are overlapping. Again, might be 'best fit'.

Clicking on the Online Character Server I see a portion of the correct screen, but not all of it. I see the User Account & Password and the buttons on the right, but the parent object which holds both of these is not being drawn correctly.

Pressing All Characters, I see a listing - but it overwrites the User Account & Password.

It almost seems like the screen co-ordinates for drawing the Online Character Server windows are either using the wrong measurement type (ie, relative positioning instead of absolute) or are referencing the wrong parent object. Something is not right with the co-ordinates.

Trying Create New Character button, then Elf of Mirkwood, I could not make a selection on the Character Background screen at all. Clicking Noble Blood box would high-light it, but it never caused the Next button to appear. Nor could I "choose two". Double-clicking resulted in the widget moving(?) icon to appear.

Also the scripting seems very slow in comparison to Firefox. But I do not know if this is normal.

Anyway, what is your character's exact name? Perhaps I can look it up for you and send you a copy. Feel free to PM me instead if you prefer.

I'm running Firefox 12 and refreshed my cache (ctrl-f5). I am getting this error when trying to pull up any of our group's private characters:

Ack! You are correct. I could see the list of characters but never tried to load one. I thought the error was occurring with the sign-in / listing. Not the displaying. Sorry for the confusion.

I do know that, at least in Firefox's case, that JSON was altered. I remember seeing it in the Release Notes for v12. Couldn't say what was altered - just know that as I scrolled through about 8 pages of bug fixes I saw JSON go by once or twice.

Hopefully Azrapse will be able to find and correct the problem with minimal effort.

BTW, anyone with a RPG.Net account might want to post a message over there confirming the problem. Link to correct Forum Topic is available under About button.

I posted on rpgnet and azrapse has already noted there that he'll look into it.

Before saying anything else, please excuse me for my absence. For some reason I have stopped getting mail updates when someone posts in this thread. I don't know why.

Regarding the errors with the character loading... I present my excuses again. Though this time it was not my fault. It happens that my hosting provider (the people I pay to for hosting my page) got infected through Wordpress with a trojan that injects some script into all responses for any request made to PHP. In my case, it affected the character listing, loading and saving, and the chat function, that are the only stuff that is dispatched from PHP.
If someone has got antivirus warnings when listing characters or posting chat messages, that's why. The script itself isn't harmful against the machine, but it attempts to redirect the user into some nasty website.

Fortunately my page most of the time talks to the PHP server only through AJAX, by sending and recieving chunks of JSON data (not showing the responses directly into the browser) and thus the malware couldn't act as intended.

Unfortunately, the JSON decoder isn't clever enough to discard the injected script when recieveing the data, so you were getting JSON parse errors. That is, when trying to read some character data from the server, the application found more stuff that expected, and discarded everything, showing that error.

I sen't some angry mails to my hosting service and they fixed it. So everything is working again.

I first noticed all this problem when you posted in RPG.NET (because I was not getting updates from here). If someone has got their game session screwed because of this, I'm truly sorry. I myself couldn't properly use the character sheets during my weekend session and I was really pissed off. I had to get the data directly from the database and load it back into the sheets with the Load Character From Code function in the main menu... Sigh...


Garn, the page is compatible with Internet Explorer version 9 or higher. Version 8 and lower don't follow the CSS3 styles to the letter and I can't really gather the energy to make them work on outdated browsers because browsers are free software anyway and anyone can just update to the last version or use a modern browser if they really want.
I can't really match together in my mind the profile of someone that plays PnP RPG games with a person that can't even install Chrome or Firefox, or click on Update to IE 9 in Windows Update. If you can assimilate a 100 page core book of rules, you have the skills to update your browser.
(I'm not talking about you, of course. I'm just using the majestatic you

I am aware that the numbers in the boxes appear misaligned on the printer view. I think it is either related to the hacks we had to do for the iOS versions, or I have just not got it to center them right. I can have a look at them again...

Not a problem Azrapse. IE is only a back-up browser; otherwise I don't touch it. Don't sweat the fonts or anything else. I just mentioned them in case they were symptoms.

Sorry to hear that your web hosting site was infected - but glad to hear that your own scripting was minimally affected.

Hi everyone,

First, I want to thank you Azrapse for this wonderful character generator. It helps me a lot when I introduce a new player to the game.

Now for my question, is it still possible to translate the text as mentioned in the attached quote? The link shows a blank page for me.

I have my french copy of the book (the french editor put the two books in one hardcover) and I volunteer to retype the whole thing so my players can enjoy the game and the generator in their mother tongue.

Thank you,

Fredub

I'm not Azrapse, but you will find that many of the older file links in these forums have expired due to the owner not periodically signing into these forums and their file-storage or image-storage website (dropbox, image shack, etc). Generally you're only allowed 90 days at most before the contents of these other sites are deleted.

Hi again!
My links have not expired, Garn, as I own that site and keep paying my bills.
Fredub, if you want to contribute translating the webpage into french, that would be really welcome. But I warn you again that there is quite a lot of text to translate. In special all the descriptions of skills and traits.

As I say in the text you quoted, if you want to translate it, go to that link and download it. Yes, I know it shows a blank page. That's because it only contains texts in a way so that the main program can find them, not for showing them.
To download it, if you use Firefox, click on the Firefox menu button and select Save as...
If you use Chrome, click on the Wrench icon to the right of the address bar and select Save page as...
If you use Internet Explorer 9+, click on the Cog icon to the right of the address bar, then File, then Save As...
I bet if you have some other browser, you can find the Save as... command easily.

Once it is downloaded, open it with a text editor that is able to work with UTF-8 text files. Don't, oh don't use Word or anything like that. Ultraedit, Notepad++ or most decent editors with HTML syntax folding will be okay.
If you have no chance but using the simple Windows Notepad, when saving the file make sure that you save it with Save As... and you select the UTF-8 encoding in the saving dialog.

The file contains an HTML structure full with blocks like this:
<div name="resentful" fullname="Resentful">A resentful adventurer is often bitter and angry with the
people he ought to protect, as he feels that he risks his
life for individuals that fail to recognise his actions on
their behalf. </div>
Do not translate the value for the name attribute. You must only translate the value of the fullname attribute and the text contained until the next </div> tag.

If you have any other question, please tell me.

Oops, didn't mean to imply anything of the sort. I blush to say I never looked at the link's actual address. Just pulled out a "standard answer" with regards to old messages and lack of an image/file when clicked on.

It's just that many of us make use of free file and image hosting websites that require periodic user contact or the contents are removed. So hearing what appeared to be the same issue, I replied incorrectly.

Garn, thanks for trying to be helpful; that's what makes this forum a great community!

Thank you Azrapse for the explanations! My computer skills are so outdated that I really needed them as detailed as you did.

One good thing for me is that I don't have to translate the text because Edge Entertainement did that with the french version (which I own along with the english one).

The task will be to retype all the text (there's a lot of it) and make sure that there is no typing errors or misplaced paragraphs.

I just hope real life doesn't gets too much in the way.

Thank you, I will keep you informed of the progress.

Fredub

Don't worry, Garn. I actually thank you for attending the visitors of this thread in my absence.
Fredub, if you have the french version in PDF, it would ease your task quite a lot.

Hello,

I am starting to use this online generator and am really impressed! kudos for a fantastic work! I have a doubt, though. When I have to choose my 10 points in skills, I cannot select a new weapon skill. For example If I create a Barding of Dale and choose Great Bow at the beginning, I cannot select sword later when I can spend my 10 picks. Am i doing anything wrong?

Hi. No, you are not doing anything wrong.
The last step of the character creation, the one about spending the 10 points, is missing the choice of spending 2 points to get a new weapon skill at rank 1. Good catch!
I don't know when I will fix it, as I'm quite busy with my work lately, but for sure that I will do it.

For now, you will have to leave some points unspent, click on finish, and then add a new weapon skill manually by clicking on some empty Weapon Skills slot in the character sheet.

Thanks for the bug report!