DunGen goes Mobile

What's new?
Upgraded DunGen from vis.js 3.6 to 4.4 today. Thanks, Almende devs. Vis.js on GitHub, it's awesome! They do all the graphical and animation heavy lifting in my app. I just hook it up with a bunch of random generation tables. There is more to do to take full advantage of the new version, but it is now working and the edit tools work on both computer browsers and mobile (tested from my Android tablet). This closes one of the big gaps in DunGen. It means anywhere I have WIFI, I can edit dungeons on the tablet.

I'm so excited. The upgrade was suprisingly easy. They did a good job with console hints and docs to get through the basics of adapting to the new API.


Coming up...
There's a lot to do now on two major fronts. 1) Data portability, and 2) Themed dungeon generation.

Portability
It needs some solution for accessing stored dungeons from more than one device, so one edited on a computer can be used on another or a tablet at the game table. This probably means a server and either accounts or tokens. Accounts means having to deal with basic security, password retrieval, etc. Blah. A token solution, where it saves with an identifier and anybody that knows the identifier can retrieve the record, is a bit more awkward in one way, but may be easier for sharing. The other option is a file export/import scheme where you mail a copy of the dungeon around. Not sure how that would work on an iPhone though, which doesn't give convenient file system access and it would be awkward to edit from different machines and keep track of which one has the latest "truth". Export/import would have an advantage in editability as long as the file format is human readable, since editing could be done in any text editor and then reimported.

Themes
I want to make use of all the tagging I did of monsters to allow for customized generation by themes: the cultists in their Temple or the Necropolis full of undead, with a dialog to list tags to include, and constrain the generator to roll only  or mainly things that have one of the selected tags.

Once that is working, I go through all the node and edge templates (maybe magic items too?) and set up tagging for them, so the places can fit the theme as well and the critters.

Later...
Small content expansion happens whenever I think of something else to add to tables, but after the big things are handled, the next up is probably to expand on some of the NPCs and more intelligent monsters so they generate with names, and are more fleshed out with descriptive text and some loose stat guides or OSR compatible stats.