Post
by Glorelendil » Tue Jun 03, 2014 2:47 pm
Now that James is up and running, I thought I'd outline some of the features I'm thinking of working on and see what appeals to folks. Please give feedback on what you'd like to see.
1) Calendar. I've had some requests to support the Shire calendar. I'm using javascript Date objects, so as long as there's an algorithmic conversion it should be straightforward to display other calendars, including Quenya, etc. I'm also thinking about formatting the cells so that it shows the date and day of the week. (Which will require knowing the year, so I'll have to add a field for that to the UI.)
2) Weather. This one could be huge and messy and complicated...just the way I like it. My idea is to pick a real world area that correlates to each region, weather-wise (I'll need help with that part). Then use climate data...average temperatures, frequency of rain/snow, etc....that varies by calendar date, to generate daily weather for each step of the journey, depending on when you are traveling. I'd probably track it internally by actual temperatures, but turn it into descriptive words, "Warm & Sunny", "Torrential Rains", etc.
3) Hazards. I could build a database of potential hazards, tagging each one with locations where it can happen (either regions like "West Upper Vales" or specific locations like "Forest Gate" or "River Running"). Then for any cell in your journey, if a Hazard is rolled the LM can get a list of Hazard ideas, sorted by role. Hazards could also be season-dependent.
4) User Annotation. This was in the first version, but I took it out to focus on journeys. But I could let other people add their own notes & locations to the map, and then share them with other LMs/Players.
5) Official Information. Similar to my bestiary (see .sig below) I could start linking all these regions and locations to the page numbers in the books, and when you click them it would open the pdfs and go to that page. It would require you choosing your pdfs from your own directories every single time, which frankly is sort of a pain. (Thank you, Saul Zaentz.)
6) Book references. I could also start building an index not to game materials, but to original sources. Actually, I'd probably make that a user-built thing as well. As long as people restricted their contributions to a few sentences, and included book & page references, the copyright police would probably be ok with it.
7) New Map. Valarian has created his own Middle Earth maps, to the same scale as the C7 ones, in a CAD program. I could work with him to have a default map load automatically, so that you wouldn't have to use your own map every time. This would also help folks who own the physical books but not the PDFs.
What do folks want?
Last edited by
Glorelendil on Tue Jun 03, 2014 3:25 pm, edited 3 times in total.