Different

This section is called "Different" but rpgEE is really "the same". There's really only so many ways to slice the pen-and-paper-to-online transition, and they've pretty much all been done as far as I can tell. Chat systems with maps, miniatures, and fog-of-war are de rigeur for such things.

The rpgEE system is based on my desire to be able to run an online pen-and-paper RPG online. There were and are a number of products that allow this. I've tried most of them, and they all have one drawback or another that I found unacceptable. One common issue that plagued the OpenRPG product forever now is the inability to work very well on the Mac. Several of my friends are Mac aficionados and it was simply too much trouble getting OpenRPG to work. Other products, like Battlegrounds and Klooge, had their own issues.

Besides the ability to operate on everyone's machines effectively, another issue was extensibility. Online RPG software needs to be more than an application. It needs to be a platform. After a couple of starts with other products, I took someone's advice and started writing my own. My background, at least for the last 10 years or so, has been in enterprise level software. Thus rpgEE was born.

rpgEE is expected to be an enterprise level application, extensible as well as scalable. A server should be able to handle many, many client simultaneously (within network limits) and eventually I hope to make it capable of being clustered. The server itself should be managed as a webapp, and published in such a way that it's easy to handle for server admins yet completely usable for GMs to run games on and for players to play those games on.

Of course, that capability has a price in the form of server footprint. The end result product is expected to be deployed on a container. The management application will be a webapp and will need to run inside a servlet container. The easiest way to provide that is to build an enterprise-deployable application in the form of an EAR. J2EE containers, the target market for EARs, are not spry little creatures. It is our intention to attempt to get some folks to host rpgEE games on donated servers, and to provide for a "minimal" implmentation of a container (probably Apache's Geronimo) as the default personal config. This will take hosting rpgEE out of the capabilities of many people, but them's the breaks. Perhaps refactoring will allow us to manage with only Spring and Jetty, but for now we're anticipating a J2EE container server deployment.

Note that this only applies to the server. The client is expected to be a JNLP-deployed application out of the management web-app. Currently, the only real requirement for the client is to have a running Java 1.5 JRE on your system. Since this is simple for the three major OSs, and possible for most others, I think it covers the ground sufficiently.