Tag Archives: Anima: UNICO

Whatever happened to Anima: UNICO?

I updated Anima: UNICO for the last time three months ago, on 17th July. In that date I still hoped to be able torun a crowdfunding campaign to help me end the application with a big final push, to add the missing rules (monster powers, sheeles, gaïa 2…), support for gaming groups, houserules, random NPC generator, etc. Soon after that day, those hopes vanished and, although it was not my intention, that brought unto me a certain let down about Anima.

Since then, I have started a way in Patreon for anyone who wanted help me develop roleplaying software, and have started the first of such software: Workings of Fate, a set of tools for the Fate CORE system. The first tool is the Aspect Generator, to generate random aspects. It is still in development, as I want to add more variety and coherence to its results.

But the numbers are clear. Right now there are 163 users registered in Anima: UNICO, and 367 characters saved in its database (yes, many of them will be repeated, but still, there are a lot). During 2014, 3,521 users have started 7,823 sessions in Anima: UNICO.

(For comparision, Workings of Fate has received 198 sessions from 162 users in aproximately a month).

So it is time to start again looking for time to keep developing Anima: UNICO. These are the main points in my agenda:

  • Start the english and french translations. As there is now no impediment, I’ll get the help of anyone who wants to participate.
  • Debugging. There are several recurring bugs I have to eliminate. Mainly:
    • Ki section vanishes when buying certain abilities.
    • Ugly can crash the application.
    • MA and zeonic regeneration calculations are not ok.
    • Natural bonuses sometimes fail.
  • New functions. Main ones:
    • Monster powers.
    • Printable sheet (and PDF, if possible).
    • Rate of Fire and reach of projectile weapons.
    • Unarmed as a weapon.
    • Damage percetanges.
    • Sheeles.
    • Gaïa 2 content.
  • Comunity functions.
    • Gaming groups, with a DM to set the generation options to be used by the players.
    • Selection of books to appear in the application.
    • Houserules.
  • And derived applications:
    • Name, aspect, origin random generation.
    • Quick NPC random generation.

All of this will take me a lot of time, but it will slowly march forward.

And if the development of further software for roleplaying games seems interesting to you, remember supporting me in Patreon or streaight in Paypal (you can get the donation button in the Workings of Fate page)!

Anima: UNICO – Crowdfunding on its way

As you may have seen, this last month the development of Anima: UNICO has slowed down a lot. That’s the thing about hobbies: they get the last spot on the priority queue. I would like Anima: UNICO to get to a better position in that queue. And, for that, it has to rise from “hobby” to “work”. And, nowadays, that means CROWDFUNDING!

Soon (I’m still missing some pieces) I’ll launch a crowdfunding campaign through IndieGoGo, with the objective of speed up the development of Anima: UNICO, and in case the campaign goes extremely well, to expand a little its scope.

I would love to hear your opinions and suggerences.

Making of Anima: UNICO – Localization

Here I am again. Today I am going to address a tricky issue: localization, this is, translating the application to other languages. Just from the start, there are several issues with the process.

I can’t just translate every game term to other language: I have to find and use the word used in the official translation. Luckily, I count with the great help of Vincent ‘Moklo’ Bouscarle, corrector of the French edition of the game, who is translating A:U to French, and Andre ‘Dynaes’ Reich, from the English forum, who is translating to English. I want to use this chance to, again, thank both for their help.

As I have explained before, Anima: UNICO is designed mostly in three layers. Model layer organizes information. Controller layer knows the models and the views and manages the generakl workflow of the application. The View layer gets data from the Controller and shows what the user sees in the screen. Only this layer has to be translated.

My solution

function setIdiomaUI() {
   var lang = navigator.language || navigator.userLanguage;
   
   if ((lang.lastIndexOf("es") != -1) || (lang.lastIndexOf("spa") != -1)) {
      IDIOMA_UI = SPA;
   } else {
      IDIOMA_UI = ENG;
   }
}
function L(id, spa, eng) {
   this.id = id;
   this[SPA] = spa;
   this[ENG] = eng;
   if (!diccionario["ANIMAUNICO_"+this.id]) {
      diccionario["ANIMAUNICO_"+this.id] = this;
   } else {
      console.log("Clave de diccionario repetida: [" + this.id + " / " + this[SPA] + " / " + this[ENG] + "]");
      console.log("--Clave previa: [" + diccionario["ANIMAUNICO_"+this.id].id + " / " + diccionario["ANIMAUNICO_"+this.id][SPA] + " / " + diccionario["ANIMAUNICO_"+this.id][ENG] + "]");
   }
}
L.prototype = {
   constructor: L,
   toString : function() {
      return this[IDIOMA_UI];
   },
   getId : function() {
      return this.id;
   }
};
function _l(clave) {
   if (diccionario["ANIMAUNICO_"+clave]) {
      return diccionario["ANIMAUNICO_"+clave].toString();
   } else {
      return clave;
   }
}

A bit of explanation: I have a class, L, that will be instantiated with every string to translate and its translations. I also have a function, _l, that gets the id of a string and returns the translation to the current user interface language. The Model and Controller layers work only with the id of the strings, which are unique. When the View layer shows any string in screen, it does so through the _l function.

The initialization of strings is like this:

var UI_DAÑO_FINAL = (new L("UI_DAÑO_FINAL","Daño final","Final Dmg.")).getId();
var UI_VELOCIDAD = (new L("UI_VELOCIDAD","Velocidad","Speed")).getId();
var UI_TURNO_FINAL = (new L("UI_TURNO_FINAL","Turno final","Final Init.")).getId();

As you can see, this is only for spanish and english. When the french localization starts, I’ll just have to add another field to the class L and another argument to every string.

Obviously, this solution still has several problems. For example, it is not specially good to form sentences with several variable parts, as it does not account for sintactic differences between languages. But for a character sheet, that will mostly show isolated terms, it is working well enough for me.

 

Making of Anima: UNICO – General structure

In my last post I went through the tools I’m using to develop Anima: UNICO. I have to add another one: SourceTree, a graphical UI for Git very useful and nice, and which makes easier following the GitFlow pattern. Obviously, I don’t need to use GitFlow (and actually I don’t follow it fully), but I like it, as a base over which organize me.

Now, let’s start with the meat. First, how to organice a javaScript application the size of Anima: UNICO? After my initial investigations, I arrived to the following workflow:

  1. I create as many Javascript files as I want/need, usually one per class.
  2. To publish them, I use Grunt to concatenate them and then to minify and uglify them. This way I get only one JavaScript file to publish on the web.

Regarding the organization of the javascript files, I’ve been following (more or less) Model-View-Controller patterns.

  • js/ – General folder for javascript files.
    • controller/ – Controllers.
    • data/ – Data.
    • view/ – Views.
    • model/ – Models.
    • locale/ – Localization.
    • libs/ – Third party libraries
    • vendor/ – Third party libraries
  • sass/ – SASS files.
  • img/ – Image files
  • fonts/ – Fonts
  • css/ –  CSS files.
  • index.html – Main web.
  • indexLocal.html – Main web for local debug.
  • Gruntfile.js – Grunt script.

Controllers

They control the communication between models, prepare data for the user, and receive the user actions and act on them.

Data

The concrete instance data for every class. This is, the data for every Advantage, Spell, Martial Art, etc.

There are several ways of storing data. As I wanted my application to work offline, I could not use a database. In the end, I stored them in their own initialization. This really is a bad idea. I should have stored them in JSON format from the start. In the future I will make the change.

An example:

addVentaja(new Ventaja( VENT_APRENDIZAJE_INNATO_EN_UN_CAMPO, “”, VENT_APRENDIZAJE_INNATO_EN_UN_CAMPO_DESC, REPETIBLE_OPCIONES, [2,3], [], true, [LISTA_TIPOS_SECUNDARIAS], [aprendizajeInnatoCampo], GRUPO_SECUNDARIAS ));

This line of code initialices the advantage “Natural Learner, Field”.

Views

Views generate the UI and interact with the user.

Models

Models are the base classes. Character, Race, MartialArt, etc…

Localization

Localization is everything related to showing the application in several languages. Right now, this means spanish and english, and french is in the works. For this, I have the inestimable help of Andrew “Dynaes” Reich and Vincent “Moklo” Bouscarle.

In another post I’ll detail how I do the localization.

 

Making of Anima: UNICO – Tools

Here I am again. As promised, I’m going to talk about the tools I use to create Anima: UNICO. Without further ado…

1. Language: HTML+CSS+JavaScript client-side, PHP server-side

This one is easy. The main development of Anima: UNICO is made in JavaScript. The web itself is done in HTML, but it is mainly created dynamically from the code using jQuery. The representation is almost totally controlled by CSS.

2. Frameworks and JavaScripts libraries: jQuery, jQuery UI, Modernizr, Gumby

One of the strong points of JavaScript is the great quantity of existing developments. Very probably jQuery is the most famous. It allows working with the webpage DOM without going crazy.

Beyond jQuery, I started using jQuery UI as base for the user interface. jQuery UI is a framework with functions to create buttons, dialogs, draggable components, etc.

Modernizr is a small library which easies the design among different web browsers.

Gumby is a framework to create adaptative webpages, ehich adjust themselves to the screen size. Is the base I use to format the page.

3. Frameworks and PHP libraries: CakePHP

For the server-side, I’m using, in a very basic way, CakePHP, which offers me just what I needed.

4. IDEs: Jetbrains WebStorm, JetBrains PHPStorm

I’ve fallen in love with the JetBrains IDEs. I loved WebStorm  to develop JavaScript, and when I started using PHP, I jumped to PHPStorm (which includes all WebStorm functionality). They are very powerful environments, and integrate everything I wanted them to integrare: version control, remote database, ftp, libraries…

Also, through them I discover the technologies from the next point.

5. More: Node.JS/NPM+Grunt, SASS+Compass, Mocha

JetBrains IDEs integrate with their own Node.JS server, which allows the use of lots of useful scripts. I discovered Grunt, which allows to automatize tasks (it is similar to Make), and used it to unify, minimify and uglify mi javascript files and get them ready to deploy to production.

6. Version control

I started using Subversion as version control, but some months ago I discovered and learned Git, and never looked back. It is a really great VCS.

7. Tasks, general management, online repository: Assembla

I found several online repository options. In the end, I chose Assembla, which offered me a very nice free plan. It integrates with svn and git and offers task and ticket management, that I can integrate with PHPStorm.

8. Reports and web analysis: Google Analytics

In my web I use Google Analytics to check daily views, language, browser… important details for a JavaScript project.

That’s all for today. Next day I’ll start with the code structure.

By the way, you can find the code in GitHub. Go ahead, fork it!

Making of Anima: UNICO – Introduction

Logo de Anima: UNICO

Hello to everyone.

I’m starting with this post a series about the development of Anima: UNICO, mi character generation web application for the role-playing game Anima: Beyond Fantasy. Let’s see if I can do one or two of these per week. I think I will be able to share many interesting things for anyone looking to develop a similar web application.

First, a bit of background. I started to develop Anima: UNICO around September/October 2013 (I can’t remember the exact date). Inspired by the great character generation web application made by my friend Azrapse for the game The One Ring, which we use almost every week to play, and moved by the lack of character generation software for Anima, one of my favourite role-playing games, I decided to start working on it.

However, Anima: UNICO was not my first work in web based character generation. I have (and very advanced, actually) a similar application for  7th Sea, and I also started one for Hackmaster (for the current edition). With the Seventh Sea one I lacked motivation (although I want to finish it some day). The Hackmaster one I abandoned when I learned that the game creators were developing their own character generation application: I’m not interested in doing useless work.

I have said before that there was no character generation software for Anima, but it seems I looked for it very poorly back then, because around February 2014 I searched again and found several projects. The main one, is the ingenious excel sheet made by several members of the Anima Spanish forum (I think the main developer is Solkar). It is so good that, were I to see it before starting my work on Anima: UNICO, I probably would have never started the development. I also found out that someone did a little crowd-funding in Indiegogo to develop a character generation application for Anima. I have seen no further movement there, and I don’t know if they got to develop anything. In any case, it seems they have made public nothing.

My goals for Anima: UNICO when I started with it were basically (and in this order):

  1. Allow to fully create characters in the web application and also without Internet connection.
  2. Develop it in JavaScript: the One Ring application convinced me that it was the best way.
  3. Develop it around the current rules (Core Exxet) with all the supplements (Domin Exxet, Arcana Exxet, Prometheum Exxet, Gaïa 1, Gaïa 2, Those Who Walked Among Us, Master Screen, we supplements 1, 2 and 3, and any other book that gets published).
  4. Allow the incorporation of house ruled items, like classes, abilities, advantages, disadvantages, martial arts, ars magnus, spells, etc.
  5. Allow saving the characters, defining game groups, defining a DM in the group, that the DM could be able to set which rules to use, and that the group members, when creating their characters, used directly those rules.
  6. Allow the DM to demand “fair” characters: with this option checked, all the random part will be made in server-side.

In the next post I’ll talk about the tools I’m using (and those I used and stopped using).