joffrey/crea repository overview

⁠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 .
  

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• 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

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.

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.

Legal reasons.

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.