Geek synergy would be an apt description. I’m going to take two things that make my heart all a flutter, RPGs and databases, and let the two run wild through a field of wild flowers and see what offspring they produce in time. This has been an idea that I have toyed with for a long time, plans often centering on building a web application, but the time and tools never felt quite right. This time, however, I am going to jump right in but scale things back a little bit.

OpenOffice 2.0 was rolled out with the latest build of Ubuntu and it includes their database solution, Base, which for all intents and purposes is very closely related to Microsoft Access. It seems that Base would be a great place to start building a self contained campaign manager similar to the commercial offerings out there. Those commercial offerings have really been a thorn in my side as well, only running on Windows and often featuring some real janky interfaces and cludgy reports so I figured I’ll do the opposite; I’ll make it open - you’ll just need OO2 - and easy on the eyes - none of this VB Forms 1.0 crap.

The very first offering 0.001 should be ready in a day or so and will cover characters, both PC and NPC and basic reporting on said characters. The challenge will be translating the one-dimensional yet relational character sheets into normalized data sets; I would like to do it right the first time because nothing is worse than normalizing and existing structure. Trust me it can me like eating mayonnaise sitting out on a sweltering July afternoon.

Now just to think of a name. Base Camp, sounds just cheesy enough.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 at 11:03 am and is filed under Programming, Tabletop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.