dolanor-galaxy/crea

Connected Roleplaying Enhancer Application

CREA

Connected Roleplay Enhancement Application.

Manifesto

• CREA is a project that aims to help tabletop RPG players organize and play games online in a real-time manner.
• While it won't propose to implement every possible game system in existence, it is designed from the ground up to be highly extensible through a system of plugins.
• As such, CREA is an open-source, free for non-commercial use project.
• While its core purpose is to enable tabletop RPG to be played seamlessly online, the plugin system should be extensible enough to allow any real-time social activity to happen on its framework.

Planned features

• Highly flexible plugin system
• Real-time events
• Prepackaged native plugins for common tasks such as image sharing, live chat or dice roll
• Additional plugins for free-to-use game systems (d20, etc.)
• Authentication and ACLs (player identifcation, private plugins, DM rights)
• Session management
• Documentation on how to write additional plugins
• Documentation on how to install external plugins
• Plugin packaging and auto-installer

Technicalities

This is a web application developed in Javascript using

• qooxdoo as a client-side framework
• node.js on the server-side
  • More specifically the express microframework

Installing / running

These instructions will evolve as the project matures. Right now it's aimed at producing a development version of the project.

You need node.js v0.10.x and Python 2.x to follow these instructions.

• Download the Qooxdoo >=3.5 SDK from here.

• Extract the qx folder in this project's parent folder.

• Run ./generate.py source-all.

• Do the following:

    path/to/crea $ cd server/public
    path/to/crea/server/public $ ln -s ../../source .
    path/to/crea/server/public $ ln -s ../../../qx .
  

• Inside the server/ directory, run npm install

• Go to the server/ directory and run node app.js

• Point your browser to http://0.0.0.0:3000/source/index.html

Q&A

Why make this project?

I want to recapture the feeling of tabletop sessions with friends who live all across the country. It's also easier to organize a session when you don't have to worry about finding a place, going there and coming back. And it's an interesting technical challenge when framed like that.

Why choose Qooxdoo? It's obscure! You should use Angular/Knockout/Ember/Backbone/Batman/wtfjs

In my limited experience, Qooxdoo is actually the best at enabling creation of rich web applications with limited resources. While I don't agree with all its design choices, I still feel it is a relatively flexible framework and I enjoy working with it.

Why no D&D/WoD/etc. plugins?

Legal reasons.

It seems like the system can only support one group of players at a time. What gives?

This may change in the future, right now I feel this prevents abuse if a corporation were to take it and try to make it a paying service, which I don't want to see happen.