Rollem Table Roller / News: Recent posts

Rollem FRP Table Roller program V0.5 released with enhanced expressions, regression testing and several bug-fixes to the GUI table editor in particular. This will probably be the final beta version unless there are bug reports or enhancement requests.

Because of changes to the xml package between Python 1.5.2 and Python 2.0, I've had to change several of the internal class and method names. This means, unfortunately, that as 0.4, Rollem is incompatible with prior versions of Python. On the other hand, it's now unecessary to seperately download the PyXML package--everything needed for the XML is built in. If anyone who's using this has a real problem with this, let me know, and I'll see if I can make a compatibility wrapper.
In addition, there are some hefty upgrades to the GUI interfaces for both Rollem and RollEdit. RollEdit in particular is much more polished, with adjustable panes, tool-tips, user configurable markup colors, automatic backup, a rescan option for if you've entered XML by hand, and more.

Lead developer Joshua Macy admits puzzlement. "I released v0.3 the same day, with a brand-new GUI for creating the tables, but some people are still downloading the old version. I don't know why, unless it's because they think that 0.2b has more stuff. It doesn't--what it does have is wasted space, since it accidentally included a zip file of the whole project within the tar.gz."

So if you're wondering which to download--always take the latest.

I got yer editor right here Dept: rollem-0.3 now contains rolledit.py, a GUI editor for producing Rollem XML tables.

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah Dept: The files now include a .zip for Windows users who have trouble with .tar.gz files (the latest WinZip handles them, but not everyone has that).

V 0.2-beta now contains a GUI table roller (rollem.py). Currently it scans the tables subdirectory of the installation directory, and assumes that everything there is a Rollem table. (Eventually it will look for only *.xml files, and you will be able to change the working directory.)

Once the list of tables are loaded, you can select any table and roll on it, with the output appearing in a text window. The contents of the text window can be saved to a log (which can be placed anywhere via a standard File Dialog).... read more

I've fixed the bug that was preventing Rollem from working with the newest (Python 1.6) version of the XML support. That plus releasing enough documentation to actually let users run it and create their own tables prompted me to upgrade the project status to Beta.

I've (finally) uploaded the very first release of Rollem. Among the things missing are the GPL guff, a manifest, a REAME, useful documentation, and, well, a host of things. I think that now that I've been able to actually gets this rolling, the more blatantly missing pieces will be filled in fairly quickly.

What is there, though, works well enough to play with it, and comes with several sample tables, including a rather elaborate one for creating character histories for NPCs.... read more