ziroby / dmassist

A d20 combat initiative tracker.

DM Assist

DM Assist helps you run pen and paper d20 games. It aims to be quick and light, so you can spend most of your time working with the players, not the computer. It uses minimal information, to make it fast to setup. It provides a command line interface, because command lines allow for a great deal of power and accessible easily and quickly. But it also has standard windowing access, so you get started using it very quickly.

Features:

• Combat/initiative tracker

• Tracks hitpoints, subdual damage, and initiative rolls for characters.

• Tracks limited duration effects (such as spells), removing them when they expire.

• Integrated dice roller – most places which accept a number accept a dice equation as well.

• Complex dice equations – multiple dice rolls summed together, like 2 + 3d12 + 2d6 + 1d4 + 12

• Combined windowing and command-line interface.

• Save and load groups of characters.

DM Assist is free software, released under GPLv3.

Development

I originally wrote DM Assist in Java using a Swing interface, with model-view separation. The engine and swing portions were designed with Test First Development using JUnit tests.

I added the Android portion later. It was on the app store for a while and got over 20,000 downloads. I have not updated the Android code to the latest version, so it is no longer in the store.

I am now (July 2020) adding a Spring Boot server and will then add a JavaScript React front end.

Design

The Engine is a pure Java app, with full unit tests.

The Server is a Spring Boot RESTful microservice that exposes the actions from the engine.

The Repository is a thin Java layer to access the database.

I will decide the tech for the Database later. Changing database vendors should involve no change to the Repository.

Building

The build uses maven. To build everything:

    ./mvnw install

To deploy the Server, (coming soon) use:

    ./mvnw deploy