SMS 2 has done some great things for RPG games.  (I realize that may sound a little cocky, but if you look at the list, I think you’ll agree.)  So let’s do that, let’s take a look and what’s changed with RPG management in the last 2 years.

Pre-SMS 2

• Joint posts – done over email and once finished, one person would post it with only that person getting credit for the post.
• Preferences – everyone saw the same skin whether they were logged in or not, the same rank set, and had no control over various elements.
• Post saving – not available.
• Reporting – a handful of reports like post counts and the like.
• Skinning – easier, but far less control over how the system looks.
• Menus – static PHP files that had to be updated for each and every skin when a change was made.
• News – available, but limited in terms of categories.
• Access control – very basic system with little flexibility.

Post-SMS 2

• Joint posts – upwards of 6 people can participate in a JP with all of them getting credit for the post (an update later increased this number to 8).
• Preferences – users can specify what skin and rank set they see when they’re logged in and can set whether they want to see some of the latest posts and how many they want to see in each tab.
• Post saving – gave users the chance to start a post then come back and keep working on it later.  This along with the JP feature has made interacting with crew members for joint posts much much easier.
• Reporting – lots more reporting available including stats about the last 3, 6, 9, or 12 months of a sim, crew activity, crew milestones, and plugin information (coming in 2.6).
• Skinning – although more complicated than its predecessor, far more control over the system for those that know how to use it.
• Database menus – all the system’s menus are driven out the database so it’s very easy to update them for all your skins.
• News – same as before, but now with the ability to set up various categories.
• Access control – more robust control over what each user can see when they’re logged in.

The list could go on for a while longer, but that gives you an idea of the things that have changed.  Now, SMS 1 was a great product and really did a lot to boost Anodyne into the spotlight.  Without version 1.2, we wouldn’t be anywhere; it provided the foundation on which everything was built.

So what does that have to do with SMS 3?  If you look at SMS 1, it had the essentials, but SMS 2 added the saving posts feature.  On its own, it was pretty cool, but coupling that with joint posts meant that you didn’t have to use email or IM to do a JP with someone.  Just the other day, I found myself having to work on a JP with a few crew members because I didn’t have access to my SMS site.  It was a strange experience to be sure, and it got me thinking, sending emails to crew members is becoming less and less common place with SMS.  If I need to tell one of my players something, I send them a PM.  JPs are done over SMS, so I just get the notification then log in to SMS and add my next part.  I find that I’m emailing my crew less and less because of what SMS has added.  However, I have noticed that there’s one reason people still email, and that’s to make some commentary or ask a question about a post, personal log, or news item.  So then it hit me, get rid of the need for those emails.

Enter comments.

For years now, blogs have used comments as a way to follow-up on an entry, so why not use the same idea for SMS?  Well, that idea is going to be fully realized in SMS 3.  Now, if you have a question about a post, personal log, or news item, you just leave a comment.  Want to tell them that you thought it was a really funny post or that you really liked the way they wrote something?  You can leave a comment.  More than just eliminating emails from the process further, it’s a great way to handle some out of character stuff and it keeps things about entries where they belong, right in the entry.  I know that a couple of times, someone has responded to a post with a question, and then the author has replied to that.  Of course, when I need to find it 6 months later, I have absolutely no idea what email it was in.  Comments will help as they’ll be searchable along with content from posts, logs, and news items.

When you go to a personal log page for instance, you’ll see all the pertinent information about the log as well as a comments section (if there are any comments) at the bottom.  Just click to show them, they slide down, and you can read them in the order they came in.  Done reading?  Click hide and they’re gone.  It should be a pretty great addition to SMS for everyone who uses it.

It’s a big word to be sure, but a pretty important one when it comes to SMS these days.

I spent a bunch of time over the last 2 days working with CodeIgniter and doing my best to get internationalization support mapped out.  Why internationalize SMS?  (I should probably keep track of how many times I use that word in this post, because it’s bound to be a lot.)  Well, to this point, SMS has been an American-centric application.  I live in the United States, so it didn’t really occur to me that people outside the US would want something catered to them a little bit more than SMS2 is currently doing.  That all changes in SMS3 on two specific fronts: languages and timezones.

Today, I got languages working.  So what do I mean by languages?  Basically everything short of what comes out of the database is, in SMS2, hard-coded right into the pages.  That’s fine if everyone who uses the application speaking English.  Gut check: not everyone who uses SMS2 speaks fluent English.  I know of at least one group that’s from Europe that manually translates new releases of SMS into their language.  A lot of work right there and we needed to make it easier.  Enter CodeIgniter and SMS3.

Mac software (I’m not sure how Windows does it) provides localization by way of separate files.  So the application itself never hard-codes anything in, it’s all pulled from a separate file.  This ensures that lots of languages can be used without the translators ever having to look at source code.  Now, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.  Out of the box, CodeIgniter provides a pretty robust way of doing just that and SMS3 is taking full advantage of the feature.

When SMS3 is launched, one of the profile choices people will have is a language option.  By changing from English to another language, it means that all of the form labels and instructions will be in the language the user has picked.  Unfortunately, posts and any data coming out of the database will still be in whatever language they were posted in, but what we can internationalize, we will.  But, it extends beyond just languages, it also includes timezones.

John lives in Germany, but the sim that John is on has its server in New York City.  When John logs in to SMS2, he sees times associated with posts that make no sense to him, because they’re in the server’s timezone, not his own.  CodeIgniter again comes to the rescue.  SMS3 will actually insert all dates into the database as GMT timestamps.  Then, when those timestamps are pulled, they’ll be translated into a user’s preference of timezone.  This way, John sees times that make sense according to the timezone he’s in.

While the average user may just scan over these features, they’re actually a huge deal because it starts to give SMS more global appeal.  On top of that, it opens up the possibility for community interaction on new levels.  Because John lives in Germany, he’d love to be able to see things in German, but the game master has told him that there isn’t a German translation available.  Never fear, if John has a copy of the files, he can easily create a translation and the game master can upload it to the server.  What’s more, the game master could pass those files along to Anodyne and suddenly, Anodyne has SMS3 available in another language.  The hope is that this will both strengthen SMS’s global appeal and help widen the Anodyne community outside of the United States!

There were a lot of considerations to make when sitting down to figure out how we were gonna tackle SMS 3.  Certainly consideration #1 was the framework, and we’ve already talked about that pretty extensively in other blog posts.  After that, we wanted to address the notion that skinning in SMS 2 is just too hard.  I’m a little biased about that because I was the one who designed the skin template, but I do see where people are coming from.  It can be tough for a beginning to get a grasp of what’s happening when you’ve gotta jump between 5 or 6 files.  If you know how it works, it’s pretty easy.  That’s one end of the spectrum, and the other is that people wanted skinning to be more like SMS 1 and be all about images.

A bit of a history lesson here.  The reason that we left the SMS 1 type of skinning for 2.0 was because of the limitations it presented.  If you wanted to skin things to stretch across the browser window, it was incredibly difficult with SMS 1 and SMS 2 fixed that issue.  However, in doing that, going back to the old SMS 1 way of doing things wasn’t very easy (though someone did take the time to port the old skins).

Then, there were always issues about people wanting to modify files, but then us telling them it wasn’t a good idea because their changes were going to get wiped out by the next update.  That applied to code changes as well as aesthetic changes.  It’s a tough place for people who want to modify their system to be sure.

The goal of SMS 3 is to find a middle ground and making skinning a lot easier.  Step one in doing that is making sure that we have documentation that thorough and well-thought out.  That part has already started and will be part of a massive user guide that will be launched with SMS 3.  We’ll be dropping the wiki and developing a small website with more information than you’ll know what to do with!  Step two in coming to that middle ground was developing a flexibility in the system that skinners and plugin developers would love, and I think we’ve arrived at that in a stylish and incredibly easy way.  Warning: the following information is likely to change, but at least you’ll be getting an idea of how easy SMS 3 will make skinning.

Flexibility in skinning for SMS 3 exist on three primary levels.  The first is the flexibility of what themes a skin can (or cannot) include, the second is how skins are rendered, and the third is seamless substitution.

Each skin is broken up into themes.  The main site is one theme, the admin site is another theme, and the login screen is its own theme.  All of those themes make up a skin.  But, you’re not required to have all those.  Let’s say you just want to develop an admin theme for your skin.  All you need to do is have the admin directory and the admin layout file and you’re good to go!  Want to add a login theme but not a main site theme?  Just add the login stuff.  The system is smart enough to go in and find what’s there and give game masters options from there.

The next point was mentioned oh so briefly above and that’s the layout file.  Currently, SMS 2 has 3 layout files that have to be used.  SMS 3 will have one.  That’s right, just one file.  It’ll be a single HTML layout with special PHP tags to go in where you want your page content, main menu, and sub navigation menus.  Make your HTML and drop the PHP variables in and you’re off to the races.  It is important to note though: Anodyne will not be going back to image-based layouts, but these new template files should be a lot easier to work with.

The final point is seamless substitution.  Some people are probably going “huh?” right about now and others are starting to get excited because they think they know what it means.  Seamless substitution is a way for skin developers to override the SMS 3 system defaults without touching the core files and without affecting other skins.  This is part of the CodeIgniter advantage: we’re finally separating system logic and presentation.  So what does it mean for skin developers?

Let’s say you want your skin to use images for headers on the manifest, but by default, the system uses text.  Hrm.  Well, in SMS 2 you could modify the file, but then when an update comes out, you have to make your changes all over again.  That’s no good.  Enter SMS 3.  In each theme, there is a directory called pages.  By default, the system looks in a global folder the layouts of each page.  So back to our example: header images for the manifest.  All you need to do is copy the view file from the global directory and put it in your theme’s pages directory.  From there, make your changes to the manifest page until you’re satisfied.  That’s it.  The system checks to see if the manifest view file exists in your skin’s theme.  If it does, it’ll use it, otherwise, it’ll fall back to the global default.  That’s right, it’s really just that easy.  All you have to do is put the file in your theme and away you go!

The goal with SMS 3 is to make things as flexible as possible to make life easier for skin developers and (hopefully) see tons of new skins for SMS!

With SMS 2.6 winding down the development process and the entire SMS 2 line quickly coming to a close, a lot of attention is now shifting toward SMS 3 and what people can expect with the next major version of the RPG management system.

It’s been nearly 2 years since SMS 2 was released and a lot has changed.  This time 2 years ago, there was no such things as multi-author posting.  No saving posts.  No players holding multiple position.  No players being able to choose their skin and rank sets.  No database-driven menus.  No database-driven configuration options.  None of it was around.  Then SMS 2 arrived on the scene and things started to change.  The product is far from perfect, but we’ve strived to provide the best possible product that’ll help game masters run their sims as efficiently as possible.  It’s true that our desire was to provide something that would help GMs get back to simming.  And, on a lot of levels, I think we have.  Are there areas for us to improve?  Absolutely, and the goal is to fix most (if not all) of those deficiencies in SMS 3.

So what kind of deficiencies are we looking at as we dive in to developing a gameplan for SMS 3?  For starters, the genre issue.  Up until now, Anodyne has focused its effort on the Star Trek RPG market.  It’s a thriving market to be sure with some pretty large fleets dominating the field, however, there’s more to RPGing than just Star Trek, and we realize that.  To that end, we’re going to make sure that SMS 3 takes that into account.  There is an inherent dynamic quality to SMS that we’re just going to increase as we start to offer people the chance to set Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, Babylon 5, Star Wars, Star Trek (Enterprise, TOS, movie era, DS9, Klingon, Romulan, etc.), and even some other templates we’re still working out.

Next, we realize that not everyone runs their games the same way.  Some people want to run multiple missions.  Some people want to be able to have more than one character tied to their account.  Some people even want to be able to post as non-playing characters.  Why should SMS stand in their way?  After all, the point is to make using SMS so easy that you have more time to just play the game.  Making GMs go out of their way to modify SMS just to do that seems pretty counter-productive.  We’re going to fix that.  SMS 3 will allow multiple missions to be run at the same time.  SMS 3 will separate the concept of players and characters, meaning that one player can play multiple characters.  Take that even a step farther: one player can post as multiple NPCs.  We want to make it just that easy.  Another thing that people playing in the US may take for granted: SMS 2 uses American measurements like feet, inches, pounds, etc.  Only problem with that is that not everyone who uses SMS is in the US.  SMS 3 will give GMs the option of whether to use American or metric units.  Better yet, if you switch between the two, SMS 3 will automatically go through the proper fields and convert everything for you.  Just that easy.

Our goal is to take SMS to the next level of ease of use and power with version 3.  Lots more information will be coming out this summer, including a site dedicated to providing information about the 3rd major release of Anodyne’s premier RPG management system!

Just a quick update to say that things with SMS 2.6 are going very well. We’re about to turn the corner with the beta and I’m expecting things to be ready by early to mid July for a full release, complete with a ton of new documentation. Over the next few weeks I’ll also be talking at greater length about SMS3 and a few new things there. Until next time.