Larpwriter

Community Larp discussion
#1

So, I am currently using Larpwriter again after many years, and there are a couple of things that I find very annoying about the interface.

  • adding new relationships is really slow, as you can only add them one at a time.

  • often Larpwriter goes into a long thinking process when you save, further slowing down everything.

  • the formatting for some of the text boxes doesn’t do exactly what I say all the time, e.g. I will try to put a blank space between some paragraphs only to have this undone (most of the time) when I save.

However, there are many fantastic functions of the website. I believe it is a very valuable tool for Larp writers, and I would like to see it become even better. As such, would NZLARPs be able to fundraise and donate a decent amount of money to Larpwriter with the aim of this going towards improving some key issues that some of our Larp writers have identified?

This could possibly go alongside another donation that is just for maintenance of the website, too.

#2

Absolutely agreed that there are some bugs in the system that can be a bit frustrating when it comes to working in Larpwriter, but that it’s still a very useful service.

From what I’ve heard when this sort of thing has been discussed in the past, the creator of Larpwriter has indicated that he doesn’t have the inclination to work on the interface any further - that this might be as good as LW is ever going to get. That may just be the rumour mill, though. Anyone else know anything more about this?

#3

I will contact the creator and see if we can get the code.

#4

Trouble is that it’s the only thing out there i know of currently that does the job, we had so many headaches with it last year…Totally know what you mean about the saving load time and timeouts
Maybe someone needs to right an app for android and Apple

#5

Larpapp?

#6

I was going to say. There are a bunch of people in the community who can code. Perhaps one of them wants a side project?

#7

[quote=“Yahn Nhay”]Trouble is that it’s the only thing out there i know of currently that does the job, we had so many headaches with it last year…Totally know what you mean about the saving load time and timeouts
Maybe someone needs to right an app for android and Apple[/quote]

There’s another tool called Vellum, but I haven’t tried it yet. And if you LaTeX, the MIT Assassins Guild has not one but two seperate TeX packages for typesetting larps.

#8

[quote=“IdiotSavant”][quote=“Yahn Nhay”]Trouble is that it’s the only thing out there i know of currently that does the job, we had so many headaches with it last year…Totally know what you mean about the saving load time and timeouts
Maybe someone needs to right an app for android and Apple[/quote]

There’s another tool called Vellum, but I haven’t tried it yet. And if you LaTeX, the MIT Assassins Guild has not one but two seperate TeX packages for typesetting larps.[/quote]

I don’t, but have always wanted to. Such pretty typesetting.

#9

I don’t have the coding skills , but a LarpApp for Android and Iphone made well, may even be commercially viable and make a few bucks for NZlarps, especially if people could consult their phone App character sheet easily before game

#10

Assuming it uses free labour (a reliable source has recently informed me that the cost of commercially producing an app is non-trivial).

#11

Yeah, that’s not a small thing you’re suggesting there!

#12

Any income should go to the developers, it’s only fair. If we can swing multiple hundred dollars for armour or costuming, we can swing a few bucks for a helpful app…

#13

Which reminds me: time to flick a donation to larpwriter as well for hosting so much stuff.

#14

Hold off Idiot. I will speak to you about it soon but just talking to Florent at the moment

#15

So one of them is GameTex? Whats the other?

#16

So one of them is GameTex? Whats the other?[/quote]

Template.

#17

There is actually probably a few high school students would even take on making this app…Some pretty smart young people around… would also give it a fresh feel, Larpwriter is like something that was built in the 80’s , no offence to the developer, but it’s definitely due for some modernising and some speed tweaks.

#18

Yahn, I realise you don’t mean to be dismissive, but your comments are not realistic in the slightest and trivialises the work of software developers. Creating something reasonably complex, stable and fast, and accessible across multiple platforms as you’re suggesting, is a reasonably big undertaking. Especially the “stable and fast” part. Speaking as someone who actually works in IT as my day job, it’s incredibly naive to say this is something a couple of high dchool could just whip up.

Secondly, I might not’ve been around for the eighties of computing, but I was around for the mid nineties. Larpwriter far supercedes anything that the internet had to offer back in the nineties, let alone the eighties. Speed is an issue and the one relationship at a time thing is a pain but it’s a stable system that’s never lost any of our data and is largely bug free. For something ‘free’ maintained by someone in their spare time, it’s really good.

Software development is not ‘techno magic’ like some people think it is. It’s a complex and time consuming craft.

#19

FWIW, there’s some talk in my flat of coding something a little more up-to-speed with what we need from a LARPwriting tool, but a) it’s been shifted to the backburner because of work commitments, and b) it’s already suffering from feature-creep.

#20

I’m going to step in here with my app developer hat on. I’ve been involved in app development for over 4 years now and have many friends in the industry. I echo everything Anna says. It makes me sad that software development is starting to fall into the same bucket as the arts, where there is not enough acknowledgement of the fact that it is actually a highly technical skill that people do train for and get paid lots of money to do professionally and often work insane hours to give us the beautiful apps we have that make it all look easy. Having just finished my stint as a student, I’ve seen first hand that like many creative pursuits, students are becoming the target of cheap / free labour when it comes to app development. There are very talented ‘kids’ out there developing apps but these are nowhere near the kind of complexity that a larpwriter-esque app would entail.

I don’t mean any of the above as an attack - I am just speaking from my own experiences in this industry. Most app developers I know won’t even open their laptops for less than $10k upfront. Here’s a handy guide that I often refer to: howmuchtomakeanapp.com

So here’s my (hopefully) practical suggestion: this sounds like the of project that would be at home somewhere like Kickstarter to fund it. If there really is such a shortage of decent tools, it’s something I can imagine LARP communities around the world could get behind and crowd fund. We’d still need someone who is available / keen to make it, and it would still be a huge undertaking that wouldn’t happen overnight.