"Anyone here ever hear of TABLEMASTER by WINTERTREE?" Topic

Here's the demo: link

Have fun with it. If you encounter any noteworthy bugs, please let me know!

Any plans for a Mac version please? OSX or iOS ?

Very definitely. Exactly when the Mac version comes out is dependent on sales -- I need a compiler upgrade. Then tablet, then phone. If I can possibly afford it, I'll be getting Delphi Pro by the end of the month, because there's a whopping discount on the upgrade if I do. So Mac = coming soon, tablet = coming a bit later, smartphone = coming when I figure out how to put TableMaster on a 4" screen. (I'll do iOS and Android at the same time)

40 hours to go and just 3 Club Specials will take it over the finish line!

Pledge $300 USD or more

GAME CLUB SPECIAL! 6 copies of TableMaster, 15 Table Packs (your choice), a TableMaster T-shirt, 6 special tokens, a set of the swag, a TableMaster poster, and a bigger thank-you in the manual. (also available to game stores)

Go on, you know you want to ;-)

The Kickstarter is only $700 USD from funding, with 36 hours to go. If you've been thinking about pledging but you're not sure … if your FLGS has been thinking about it (the new GAME CLUB SPECIAL reward is available to stores, too!) but they're not quite sure … if you've thought that maybe you should up your pledge and get some Table Packs, too, or maybe the physical instead of digital version … now is the time to do it. Thanks to everyone who has backed this project, and thanks in advance to the people who are about to.

Update: 32 hours to go, $475 USD from funding. Down to the wire, here, but we can make it. It would really suck if the Mac people had to wait months for TableMaster II for the Mac because the Kickstarter failed this close to the deadline.

The Kickstarter closed at 10% over goal. It's funded, not least thanks to several backers who came from here at TMP. Thank you all.

The forums are up on wintertreeredux.com, I'm waiting on Kickstarter HQ to send me their next email so I can start getting the right things to the right people, and at this point I'm going to get some sleep. I haven't been doing enough of that lately.

Now I'll stop spamming up this board and return to the regular Monday updates.

It's Monday. I'm waiting for the termite guy. That wasn't really how my week was supposed to start.

Aside from the issue of discovering that ravenous little insects are eating my office floor (hardwood floors and the South … you get the picture) TableMaster is on course. A lot of Kickstarter backers have the latest build now (if you are one, and you haven't signed up for the Wintertree forums yet, that's where the download info is) No bug reports yet -- I'm assuming people are still just trying it out with the tables I included in the zipfile (39 of them, I think) which of course are the ones that don't trigger any bugs (or I would have fixed them already) and the bug reports will be coming thick and fast once people start trying new things.

Also, just getting the word out, when you sign up for the forums you won't have access to the download immediately, because I have to add people to the Backers group individually, so email me or post something to let me know you're there, and I'll take care of that.

The need for a termite terminator shouldn't disrupt the schedule (though I suspect it's going to be hell on my office). TableMaster is due for launch on July 23 at MegaMooseCon, and will be available through your FLGS or the Wintertree website the following week.

And now it's 10:00 Pacific time, so time for me to call Embarcadero and find out just which sub-flavor of Delphi upgrade I actually need, and throw the majority of the Kickstarter money at them, so I can start in on the Mac version of TableMaster!

Congrats on getting funded :-)

Thanks, Weasel! I need some feel-good right now.

There's apparently a helluva termite problem, and the guy they sent out thought it was funny to joke about killing my pet snakes. Yeah, go to a customer's house and joke about killing their pets, that'll make their freaking day. *growl* And I shelled out more money than I want to think about to Embarcadero, for a license ID that hasn't shown up yet. (mind you, the receipt arrived -- they weren't slow about collecting the money -- just not the all-important little number that makes it all work)

The only thing I've gotten done productive today was whacking the old manual into some kind of readable shape, so the new users have something to work from. I've found another bug in TableMaster, and no time today to debug my software because I'm worried about debugging my office floor.

God, has it ever been a Monday.

Well, it's a Tuesday this time. Monday was awesome. I found the perfect way to do grilled corn. I think I also ate too much.

One of the very last commands, .GOBACK and its variant .GOBACK TO, has been incorporated into TableMaster. If you're counting, that leaves only .NEXT (aka GOTO) and what I call the "DOS commands" -- .SCREEN, .ASK, and .CLEARSCREEN -- until every keyword from the original TableMaster that's going in there will be in, except for .GRID and its kin; you can do the same thing with tables now)

Plus there are some new ones. It now has .SQUARE, .SQUAREROOT, .BLANKLINE, and .DEFAULT. There's also some new functionality for old ones, like .NUMBER being able to set the format for its numbering, or .CLEAR being able to affect other tables, not just the one calling it.

It's been an interesting four months. At this date in March, TableMaster II was an idea that some people on TMP thought I should do. Four months later, it's an essentially completed program, in the hands of actual users, with the initial release planned for MegaMooseCon on July 23-24 (if you're coming, of course there will be cookies) and availability through the Wintertree website a week later. Honestly, I'm a little unsure of what happened for the past four months, because it's been one big TableMaster-shaped whirl.

I'm now looking beyond the launch to what I'm going to do next. There's the port to the Mac, of course; I was hoping to have that done this month, but it's more complicated than I anticipated, so it's been put off. There's the next new table pack -- think eldritch horrors and ancient creepiness, with some pulp action added. There's the Arcane Alphabets fonts to be overhauled and expanded, and the new fonts to be created. Plus all the marketing, convention planning, and general-purpose insanity.

The future is looking very different than it looked four months plus a week ago. I never planned on being a software company again, but now I am … and it's all your fault! :)

Also, the termites are apparently terminated. Look at the Wintertree blog for the snake that was involved. Cute lil' guy!

p.s. For the perfect grilled corn: fold back the husks and remove silk, but leave the husks attached. Fold them around the corn. Put 2 ears (wrapped in their husks) in one of those little cloth potato-baking pouches. Microwave on high for 4 minutes. Grill until the Maillard reaction has completed to your liking. It beats the hell out of anything that involves pots full of boiling water.

TMP is misbehaving. :( First I got a lock file error, and now it's saying this is a duplicate post (though there's no sign of any other) Looks like the database hates the living. Meanwhile, I'll try again and see if this goes through. (and Bill, if two of these turn up, nuke this one)

MegaMooseCon and the TableMaster release date are approaching at express-train speeds. I'm at the point of only fixing major bugs, which there will hopefully be no more of than I already have.

Despite "only fixing major bugs," I did add a new feature to TableMaster last week: the ability to force an end-of-line by ending a line with "=", analogous to how ending a line with a "+" suppresses EOL and makes the line "sticky".

Of interest on the wargaming side, my local chain used bookstore (2nd & Charles, an outgrowth of Books-a-Million, is the only used bookstore within 30 miles) had a bunch of gaming-related books on clearance. I picked up a few that might be interesting, more for soaking up ambience for certain genres than any specific content, and I also found the rules for something interesting called Malifaux. The rule system itself seems a little weird but interesting (it uses cards instead of dice, for some interesting effects) but its layout and objective tables gave me a really good feel for how some random generation tables could be used in wargaming. While the tables in tha book are a) specific to that setting and b) copyrighted by someone else, the concepts are enough to send me off in what should be some very good directions. I'll be doing more on this once the launch insanity is over (basically, I think I'll have some time to, well, think, some time in August.

By the way, if you haven't picked up the free InstaHex font over on the Wintertree website (www.wintertreeredux.com) you might want to. You can never have too much hex paper, and being able to turn out sheets of any size hexes you want right from your printer is always a good thing.

Totally trivial bit of weirdness from the aforementioned chain used book store: They had a half-dozen copies of the original Unearthed Arcana rulebook, absolutely mint. I picked one up, not for any real reason, but because it's in a lot better condition than the one I have in storage (stored most of my gaming stuff before what was supposed to be a temporary move!) that I've had since the mid-80s. I'm really wondering how they got a batch of essentially mint (seems like they'd never even been opened) of a 30-year-old game rulebook.

So, it's Monday once again. The TableMaster stage-1 launch is in five days. I'm living on caffeine and stress. My bank is being unnecessarily weird. And there's yet one more bug in TM, which was supposed to be finished already. It's a good thing I don't drink … though this is enough to make me consider starting.

It's unrelated to the bug, but I decided at the last minute to toss in another new command: .HR -- like the HTML command, it draws a line (actually a row of dashes) across the screen. It's just a quickie, and doesn't allow you to do things like set the character you want to repeat for your separator (that's coming, just not right yet) but it'll do for now.

One good thing about having done this before: I know it's going to get better after the convention and launch; it's always likethis. It's not as bad as my stress hormones are trying to convince me. But I'll still feel much better when it's all over.

It's all over. I feel much better.

Especially because I've now had some sleep. I'm getting too old for all-nighters, forgetting something essential, and trying to find a Wal-Mart that has the right kind of printer cable at 11 pm in the back of beyond.

But it's official: TableMaster II is a thing. The Kickstarter backers have it now, and the rest of the world will be able to buy it off the Wintertree Redux website a week from today.

And I can thank (or blame) y'all for it, since this exact thread is what got me started rebuilding it after all these years. It felt funny, old and new at once, to be wearing a Wintertree T-shirt and sitting at a table with copies of TableMaster stacked on it at a game convention … some of the people who were asking what it did weren't even born the first time around. It felt funny … but also 100% right. Yeah. That's what I should be doing.

I won't be posting regular Monday updates anymore, since the basic development is complete. Anything significant, of course, I'll drop in and leave a note -- and I haven't forgotten about doing some special tables for wargaming!

Thanks again, y'all.