tool Role-Play Master - Initial Release

[Dinosaur56]

Hello

 

I have a new tool to present to the community. It is a simple (to use) command line interface tool, written in python, but built into an exe with no other dependencies (outside of win10). Let me know if there's a better forum section for this.

 

The idea is that it can act as a companion app to pretty much any game, but it's detailed enough there's no reason it couldn't be a self contained text story engine. You write collections of events, actions, variables, etc. in YAML (or python) to produce a game file. This game file can then be loaded and you start a save based on it. At the most basic level you'll have several variables with values that are changed by actions and events, these in turn can change the status text presented to the player.

 

The original motivation was that I was sick of having to keep custom rules in my head while playing various games to make them more challenging in immersive ways. Even something basic like "how happy/energised is my character right now?". I can be quite disciplined when it comes to not exploiting game play mechanics and ruining the immersion, but I struggle to enjoyably role-play the internal state of my character some times. A lot of this stuff is very personal, and it can change radically during a play through, or when playing a different backstory or whatever, so you can't expect every mod maker to integrate into some general system within a game, if there's even the ability for them to do it in that particular game. That's where RPM comes in, it lets you offload that mental load into another application, and the only game time cost it comes with is that it needs you to alt-tab out to update it each in game day/6 hours/whatever.

 

A simple gamefile can be created by modifying the automatically generated example RPM can produce. However, writing a very complex gamefile from scratch can be a very long and painful experience, just like any text based game dev would be. The solution to this is sharing with each other, and building a library that way. I've included one moderately complex example gamefile oriented around a DD skyrim playthrough. RPM's not inherently adult in any way, but that is why it's in this forum. More generally, the only reason it's on LL at all is because I think people here are much more likely to find it useful than on other sites.

 

It started as a personal project to learn python 6 months ago, but, as often happens, the scale just kept growing, and at this point I think it might have some wider value.

 

If there is interest from the community then I'll open up the gitlab repo, and it'll also motivate me to finish my development roadmap. Documentation for something like this will be a ton of work too, so for now just ask any questions here and I'll reply individually.

 

That about sums it up, please let me know if you like the idea.

 

Downloads below.

 

 

(These screenshots are taken using the ugly default cmd window, but it looks a lot better if you run the raw python in a tool of your choice.)

 

 

Download:

 

WARNING: In future I will work out a way to make loading in equations safe, but for now the tool essentially generates python code from the text in a gamefile, that means if you blindly run someone else's malicious gamefile, they can do basically whatever they want to your system. There's a limited "max equation length" check setting, that'll block super long code, but don't count on it keeping you safe. As a general rule, if you see an equation that isn't simple math and it looks like python code then don't load it.

 

role-play_master_1.0.zip

 

 

 

[Dinosaur56]

No response so far, so I may as well open up the gitlab and leave things for posterity: 

 

RPM Gitlab Repository

 

If in future I do get back on this then the main next features will be support for:

• Multiple tracked characters
• Framework for objectives/quests
• Proper support for arbitrary game calendars (like non traditional weeks, months, etc.)
• Improved data display, like percentage bars, variable history plots, etc.

[crplivion]

im not a person that creates mods.but maybe this can some how expand in to some kind of simple standardized way people could make their own mods for skyrim.maybe for just having some sort of scripts library that could be in an mcm in game.just a feedback idea i thought of reading your post

[Dinosaur56]

Good to finally get a response!

 

Hooking it up with the games would be the ideal but haven't been able to come up with a way that would be keep things easy. It's probably more ease of development than player use though. Most games let mods write log files at least, so I think the best way to do it would be to build a mod for each game that could log events in some standard RPM format which the app could keep track of. Setting that up with the major trackable events for the most popular games could be done, but it'd be a massive amount of work (relative to my free time xD.

 

Maybe one day if there's enough interest, but I'm not finding the current implementation too painful so far.