Finally! I’m working on updating my Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition point-buy calculator! Yay! But “Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition point-buy calculator” is quite the mouthful. Maybe I should come up with a shorter, snazzier name for it in the future….
Anyway, I digress. Here is a screenshot of the updated point-buy calculator in action and below that is a list of the changes. (So exciting, I know.)
Changes
Here is a basic list of the changes:
- Information for Dragonborn has now been added. (I am so sorry for not realising I left them unfinished before!)
- Has its own page outside of the main Shianra site.
- Design looks more in line with official D&D 5e products.
- JavaScript no longer looks like it was written by a 5 year old.
What’s next for this point-buy calculator
- Adding information for more races and their variants — Aasimar, Eladrin, Changeling, Shifter, Warforged, Aarakocra, Genasi, Goliath, Minotaur, and Revenant.
- The option to give a name and gender to characters.
- A print-friendly version which includes the aforementioned name and gender of a character.
- The saving and loading of characters. Ideally, I would like to accomplish this without requiring one to login to view and edit their characters.
So, if you are interested in using this point-buy calculator, you can try it out yourself. Additionally, all of the code behind this thing is on github .
Recently, I have been working on a mosaic image maker. It was part of a challenge test, but I have since decided to clean up the code a little and share it. As per the initial requirements, it does not make use of any JavaScript libraries — it’s just pure JavaScript.
What it does
First of all, you browse for and upload an image to it. It then converts that image into a mosaic image of circular tiles. Finally, you can right click on the resulting mosaic image to save a copy of it to your computer. Simple, right?
Features and restrictions
The mosaic maker will accept almost any type of image file. Furthermore, each of the circular mosaic tiles has a customisable width and height. However, the application won’t let the tiles be larger than the original image in either their width or height and it only works with images (naturally).
Samples
There is an example shown below — the original image to the left and the mosaic image to the right. Also, there is a screenshot of the web application itself with a generated mosaic image. (The awesome Diebbie drew both of the images shown in the examples.Thank you! )
My mosaic maker is not entirely finished as there are a couple more things I would like to improve. For instance, there is little error checking and it only works on more modern browsers — two things that are quite easy to fix. Nevertheless, you can still try it out yourself . Additionally, you can view and download the source code on github .
Shianra version 2.0 was actually delayed for a month because of a small project I was working on
— a project I named Dark Merchants. It was named as such
because it takes the Dark Souls
world and makes the user/player a merchant who can buy and sell all the items found within the game
to other players and NPCs from the game.
I think, in terms of actual hours, this took me somewhere between 20 and 30 hours to complete and I
got a lot of help from a couple of
amazing people. Because of them I went from knowing nothing about ASP.NET (plus MVC, Razor, and Ajax
in this context, etc.) at the conception
of this project, to being able to use it comfortably at its completion. Before this, I was always
the PHP and MySQL person, but now I think it’s great that I
can comfortably use both.
However, I digress. Here are the details of my little Dark Merchants project which, despite being a
really simple online multiplayer business simulation game
made for browsers, was really fun to work on.
How Dark Merchants works
Individuals can register to make an account, making them players. This will be required to allow
them to play this game.
Players will each get their own personal page and are able to open market stalls from which they can
start selling items. Players will be able to trade with each
other and non-player characters, known as adventurers. The adventurers will randomly appear every so
often, both requesting and offering various different
items.
The location of the player’s store will determine how difficult some items are to obtain. This is
due to the availability of local resources and will affect
the prices of the items. Furthermore, players will be able to open multiple stores in different
locations, but only store per location.
The location will also affect how often the different adventurers will visit. Some adventurers
will prefer to visit some locations more than others.
Each adventurer will prefer different items. This means that they will be willing to pay more for
items they like. Conversely, the will also be less willing
to pay much for items they’re not particularly fond of.
Items will go through trends. Every week a different item type will be “abundant type”, making it
cheaper to purchase than usual. Similarly, there will also
be a “rare type” which will be more expensive to purchase during that week.
Planned features
Players will be able to send shipments of items between their own stores.Shipments can be sent via
various vehicles. Different kinds of carts and ships will be
the initial vehicle types. Each store will be able to accommodate a certain number of vehicles at
any one time based on their store level. Each vehicle will
have a different speed, storage capacity, and purchase price. There will not always be a “best”
choice of vehicle.
Players will be able to join a Guild which can provide various benefits and challenges.
Players will be able to compete with each other via a Rankings system. Each player’s net worth will
be used to rank them against each other. This will be based
off the total worth of all items on hand, vehicles, and the value of the stores themselves (value of
level upgrades).
Over the past few years, I have added quite a bit of content about tabletop games, video games, and their worlds to this website, Shianra. As a result, I found that it had become difficult finding specific items of interest using the old, blog style of the website. Because of that, you are now looking at version 2.0. This version will hopefully improve the usability of this site. If you have any questions or comments on the changes, feel free to leave a comment on this post or send me an email.
The most important changes – those which aim to improve browsing and finding content – are documented below. However, not all of them have been completely implemented at this stage as it will take some time to go through all of the old posts one by one and improve upon them.
- Added a functional search form to the navigational bar at the top of every page. This will search for terms through both blog posts and pages.
- Added a collapsible About and Contact section to the top of every page.
- The Game Guides section has been revamped with a new navigation method – tabs with dropdowns allowing each individual page to be switched to from anywhere within the guide.
- The Tabletop Games section has been split up into smaller, separate pages to reduce scrolling on smaller devices and make finding specific information easier. This includes contents pages and both a ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ link at the bottom when relevant.
Credits
The ‘Shianra’ original character artwork which this design features was once again created by the amazing Diebbie Illustration . Thank you so much for all your hard work! ♥
Coding this theme, ensuring proper organisation of content, and gaining greater accessibility was made easier from the use of following open source projects:
