Well I made my first character, a dwarven magician. The program seems to have saved all of his information correctly and I was able to get him created without a hitch. I will do more testing as time permits.

Any news on this program? Is it still being developed?

R2 is pretty functional for making characters. It lacks the ability to print, but calculates things quite well. I haven't worked on it in a while, too many development projects.

There probably isn't too much work left to be done, is there? Just the ability to print. I think you had a great idea with the PDF character sheets, at least I think that was your idea. In all my testing I haven't crossed any problems as of yet. Has anyone else?

EDIT: One thing I just noticed:
The audio enhancement and select sound filter do not allow you to give a rating.

It still looks like the eyeware add on is ticking off Essence and not capacity. I see the essence counter increasing.

@Magus
Add your cybereye, then right-click and select customize. Here you can add your enhancements and they will use capacity. Also, it will limit you to the actual capacity of the parent augmentation.

@Eleazar
PDF would be fantastic, but problematic to implement. Really the best way was how the SR3 generator did it, where it had HTML templates and you could select different character sheet formats. A lot of work, but interoperable and customizable as well. The issue with PDF's is that the format is locked down, where it would be difficult to change the location of where your condition monitor is stored, for instance. The printing format has to be customizable to different archetypes.

@DireRadiant
The characters are stored in XML, but it's not a particularly nice implementation for making a sheet. It only stores the saved fields, not every field, so a custom program would have to calculate any calculated fields and plug them in.

I'm in favor of the HTML-style sheets, with a standard first page and three or four different second sheets for mages, cybered characters, technomancers, riggers, etc. We could even ruthlessly steal the SR3 versions and change the labels to the correct ones for SR4. Basically you make an HTML template with some sample values that look ok, then replace all of those values with tokens. My program runs through the file, replaces the tokens with the saved character's values, then saves the HTML file to a directory.

Totally off topic, but is anyone going to GenCon? I will be there and was curious if any DnCRG testers were going to make the trip.

Try this version for making your XML files:

DnCrg_SR4_R02_07092007.zip

I found a way to get some of those calculation fields to show up in the XML file, so it will have everything your character sheets will need.

I've got the same Augmentations.dat file since October of 2006. Either you've got a really old dat file with a new version executable, or vice versa, or the exe file can't find or access the data directory. One of the above.

Try downloading the latest zip and extracting to the location of your choice and running that.

That is not a .Net issue. The error is a failure to parse a string value as the program is loading the augmentations from the DAT file. Since I can't reproduce the error, I'm not sure what I can really do to solve that problem. Did you try downloading the zip file again and re-extracting? There are no other install files, and the zip file works cleanly for me.

I downloaded it to my work machine and ran it today, no problems.

I just saw that it also happens for other things, like AdeptPowers (same error message).

@Hyde
This may seem like a stupid question, but what country are you in? I'm thinking localization might be an issue.

I have been looking at the .dat files and I think I would be able to update and add to them. There is one question I have though. Is there a specific application you use to edit these .dat files or are you actually entering all of these values by hand? I was able to convert this .dat file rather easily to an excel format, the problem is converting it back to the .dat.

Be careful, there may be some commas in the text fields themselves, which might be erroneously replaced as delimiters.

Yeah, I know about that. I now have an updated gearitems.dat with fixes for all of the things I mentioned. Now everything has ratings that should. Do you have somewhere I can upload it to? Should I send it through email?

EDIT: One other thing I noticed with traditions.dat and mentorspirits.dat. I went to go add information for these because I noticed it wasn't showing up in the program, only to find all the information needed is there. Are you experiencing this same problem?

Hello,

after using your character creation tool I realized a few things about it. First I wanted to make a few suggestions before printing is available.

1. Can you put in the character creation tool a way to manually add knowledge skills? this is important since most of my knowledge skills are obscure or unusual and not part of the normal list. Also, I do not want to edit a data file to add them in.

2. Also with knowledge skill add ins a pop up menu to tie the skill to the logic or intuition attribute to complete the skill. Similar to the SR4 character sheet where your attribute is added to the skill to give you the "dice pool" rolled.

3. add a sheet for custom equipment or weaponry. My commlink and gun are two high cost items that are entirely customized and I would like to be able to add them to the character sheet for printing.

Thank you!

#1 and #3 can be done by editing the .dat files. This is extremely easy to do; I was able to figure it out within 1 minute of looking at the file.

I am unsure of what your are asking in #2. Street Knowledge and Interests use Intuition. Academic and Professional use Logic.

Any Idea on when the Augmentation wares will be input into the dat files?

WMS

I think a DAT file manager would be neat. That would let you input custom skills and still work within the program.

If someone gets a new DAT file I will package it and make it available.

What .dat files do you want updated or added to thewolf? As I said I fixed everything in the gear.dat, so if you have somewhere for me to upload it too I will.

You can email me anything that needs to get packaged. I guess the Arsenal book is out and has new gear? Maybe it was the cyberware one.

Do you mind if I use your dat files? I want to implement Serbitar's karmic system for character building, and it'd sure save me a lot of time!

The DnCRG package and any portion thereof is distributed subject to the licensing agreement. You should be fine as long as you don't sell the DAT files or sell any package that you create with the DAT files.

Is there any way a non-comp sci person like me can help out? Enter some of the quality descriptions or summat? Because I want to help, this looks like a good character generator, apart from how it keeps crashing on me. Oh yeah, about that. I'm trying to make this mage, right? So I throw in name, created by, GM, some attributes, qualities, just normal stuff, and then I go to save it, and them OMGSPLOSION!

Adding a specialization of some sort to the character might solve the problem.

Hmm, nope. Threw in Dodge and Ranged Combat as a specialization, still gave me the same kind of error.

Hey, just (registered and) posting to say that this program looks pretty slick. The UI flows pretty well and is probably as little of a hassle to use as is possible for a Shadowrun character generator. Heh.

One tiny question, of course: Is the tradition and mentor spirit information supposed to be showing up on the Magic tab? I already added the Magician and Mentor Spirit qualities, but the relevant data for the currently selected tradition or spirit never seems to appear when I choose them. The screenshot seems to show this information as present, and I see that it's in the data files.

I'm running it on Windows XP, English language, version DnCrg_SR4_R02_07092007, etc... As far as I know, I'm just supposed to unzip it and run it.

Anyway, very cool program. And I have the references for the missing info, so I'm not completely in the dark. Thanks for the effort put into this so far!

EDIT: Of course someone already asked about this... I just didn't notice until the post. Anyway, I see the issue as well. I just wonder if something is wrong with my setup...

EDITED EDIT: And now that I figured out the search function, I see that traditions and mentor spirits are stated as not working yet. At least it's a known issue!

I love it! Nice post ^^^^

So yeah, development time is hard to come by these days. Maybe I can get something done in a week or two. Work sucks.

Very nice tool. But how can I edit *.dat Files to create my own Gear and Skill lists?

I open the skill tab and all I get displayed All i get displayed is archery, clubs, blades, automatics, dodge, and climbing. I can add the rating up but is doesn't cost any BP.

Is this because its format has been changed or is it not fully coded?

(Dat files checked, no problems. Running Version R01_02162007)

R02 is the functional program. Download that and the program will work correctly.

(DnCRG Download Page)

Something is wrong with "Orthoskin". DnCrg counts "Orthoskin" at Rating 1 with 25 Essence, Rating 2 with 50 Essence and Rating 3 with 75 Essence.
I took a look at augmentations.dat but couldnt find the error. Somebody who can fix this?

Greets

You probably need to change all the dots (.) into comma's (,). This is probably due to you zero separator setting. (plz correct me if I'm worng.
This will fix the problem. But you also need to change all of the value's is one of them is broken.