Digital Squire Beta
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What you’re looking at there is the beta of my latest project, Digital Squire.
Digital Squire is intended to be a replacement for character sheets, used by PCs at the table. It keeps track of powers, healing surges and hit points (including temporary hp). It allows you to look up any power in the D&D Insider Compendium (which only works if you’ve got a subscription, of course), as well as your class or anything else in the compendium.
It can also roll skill checks for you, optionally roll attacks for you, and has a little box in the lower left corner to make quick custom rolls.
Best of all, it loads files from the D&D Insider Character Builder! It also allows you to save your characters current state, so that you can be ready to use it next session.
Most features are there, but it’s still missing a lot. However, it should be mostly usable right now.
Let me know what you think! Please, if you have any suggestions for features you’d like to see, let me know. If you find any bugs, let me know. If you have any comments, let me know. Etc, etc.
Download Digital Squire Beta now.
It’s a good start! I’m definitely looking forward to a more complete version, and I’ll be very impressed if you can automate things like healing surges and temporary hit points based on a power’s text. Also, don’t forget to implement action points.
More importantly, the program is lightweight, and that is a Very Good Thing. If you are able to make this program run under Linux, though, then I’ll be impressed. Alternately, making it into a cross-platform Java application might not be a bad idea.
@CynicalOptimist: It’s worth trying running this under Mono on Linux, though I don’t think it will work. AFAICT, Mono doesn’t support LINQ yet, which this project uses heavily for parsing the XML.
Speaking of XML, it’s actually rather frustrating working with the Character Builder’s output for many things…
For example, I need to look in one place to find all the powers the PC has currently (i.e. not counting things retrained out), another place to find which of those powers are in a wizard’s spellbook and not actually available, a third place to figure out which spells are in the spellbook for the Expanded Spellbook feat, then I need to look up each of those powers individually to find which level they were taken at, and I’ve gotta then tie all of that together.
Sorry, just venting right now… The spellbook is being particularly vexing for me. :/
What are you building this application in? If you need or want any help with this project, I might be able to give you a hand. Of course, if you’d rather keep it all your own work, I totally understand- I like to do most of my projects solo.
Shoot me an email if you’re interested.
.Net (C#)
I’m doing it as much for practice as anything else, so I’m not looking for any help. I appreciate the offer, though.
I would like to see an option for second wind and possibly something that will allow you to track temporary bonuses. For example something that allow one to add in bonuses that are given by other player characters.
The other thing I’m noticing is that it doesn’t give you multiple uses of healing abilities, such as the bard’s majestic word. Not sure if there is an option for this, but it would be nice to have multiple instances show up if they are available.
However, I must say this will get some use at my gaming table as is. Thanks for the contribution!
@WT: Hopefully those features will be in a future version. Thanks for the suggestions!
Just an update. I had previously used the standalone version and for my game this weekend, I used the install version. I saw that it indeed has the second wind check mark to remove when that has been used and some nice other functionality. I REALLY liked the ability to use the DDI lookup feature during combat.
It worked fairly well. Crashed a couple of times but I was using two instances (one of the other gamers was AWOL, so I ran his character using the program as well). I am not sure if it was due to running multiple instances or if it didn’t like my computer (running XP).
It made running two characters really slick. Thanks again for this handy little tool!