Deity (pronounced "DEE-ity") is a GameMaster (i.e. role-playing) utility. It has a large generic component plus modules to refine it for different game systems (e.g. HarnMaster, HERO, AD&D) and to simulate weather, combat, character generation, etc.
Version 0.7 has just been released. Just extract the archive in a directory and follow the installation instructions. Deity currently has a release cycle of about two weeks. This is because I run a Harn campaign every two weeks and so need a stable program on that day.
Whew! Where previously most commands had to be entered via the command-line with very little instruction on how to do so, now everything can be done via on-screen widgets or menu options. Any of these will also display the equivalent command-line so you can learn that if you find typing to be a faster way to communicate. In addition, all there is now a "help <command>" command that will describe a command as well as all the options it accepts. The code has also been verified with Python-2.6 and matching wxWidgets library.
This is just a bug-fix release. There is no new funcionality.
The wounds acquired during all the combat can now be treated by a physician and heal (or become infected) over time.
Combat now supports missile and grapple attacks and defenses. Body blocks work (but generally are not so good as a dodge :-), too. There has also been some general bug squashing due to greater unit-test coverage.
Now includes the ability to prompt ("prompt on" command during combat) for all PC rolls during combat and testing an attribute of all characters while exploring (e.g. "alltest awareness"). The beastiary has been expanded somewhat, too.
Deity can now generate information about the island of Harn. It recognizes various environments and counts time appropriately for them. It generates weather, encounters, and local/foreign events. See the screen shows below.
Uhhh... Everything, of course! Combat (currently only HarnMaster3 is supported) is working pretty well and character generation/editing is passable.
Deity is written in Python using wxWidgets so it should be perfectly portable between Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Note, however, that despite me being a big Linux advocate, this has been developed under Windows because that's what my laptop from work runs and so that's what I have availble for development on the train and during the game.
At it's core, it's command-line driven because it is faster to operate this way than by using menus -- when you're the GM of a game, speed is important. However, I'm looking to make menu shortcuts to all the commands. You can type "?" to get a list of all supported commands in the current mode. Usage information can be had by typing the command with no parameters.
The combat "attack" command is really quite complex which is why there is a graphical interface to it. The generated command is always shown and the last combat action (shown in brackets "[...]") can be repeated by just hitting enter. Since the "attack" command can only handle melee combat and not missile weapons, there is a similar "wound" command that will do just the injury calulations after the GM has determined a hit has been scored.
This was actually my first Python program, rewritten from a couple perl versions that weren't nearly as clean. The unit-tests cover pretty much everything but some of the UI stuff and it's all set up for internationalization, though there are currently no translations.
Here is a screen shot of the "explore" mode so you can see what information is generated. (For the environment, a trailing "+" means lawful while a trailing "-" means unlawful. This is actually the internal representation; the language translation file, if I had one written, would convert this to "Rural / Lawful".)
Here are a couple screens so you can an idea how combat works.
If anybody is interested in doing work on this, either adding new
gamesystems, performing some translations, or writing instructions, please
send me mail.