Update

Hello Patrons.

As ever, thank you for your support, and a big welcome to those of you who have just joined us.  Just an update here to let you know what I've been doing over the last couple of weeks and what I'm planning to do.

One of my main objectives was to get Starbuilder out of early access, so I spent a couple of weeks adding Mechanic drones to it and released it from early access this morning. I released an errata update for Pathbuilder 2e, and will do another one this week with a couple of things I missed, AP 161 and one or two other things from the "backlog of things to add on Pathbuilder 2e".   

I also banged together a new app called Dungeonfodder, for D&D 5e summoners. It's a bit out of my normal scope but I realised I had the 5e OGL monster database and the app framework ready to copy from my Master Summoner app. It's an experiment really in the much more competitive waters of 5e.  Don't worry though - my heart is still with Pathfinder.

Now that Starbuilder is under control, I also need to think about my next major project.  I'm still debating with myself about a web app version of Pathbuilder 2e.  There are some tech issues that I just haven't managed to solve, namely that the backend "engine" of the app wasn't designed for web use, and as a result any server running it as it is would take a terrible hammering (it's just not scalable). My general experience with web based character builds is that they are a fairly slow affair, and I'm just not content with that for my own web apps.  I have a potential solution with translating the java backend into kotlin and running that in both the android app and in the browser client of the web app (eg caching everything on the user's computer so it runs faster), but I've not had much luck getting it going at the moment (kotlin is still fairly new and a lot of the frameworks I need to use for it are still in alpha). My other option is still a downloadable desktop version of Pathbuilder 2e, but I'm just not sure that it will offer that much more than the emulated versions that people are using at the moment to make it worthwhile.   I'll be doing some more "R&D" in the next few weeks to explore the options.

Dave.