Any thoughts?

Thanks for the awesome podcast Chris. It makes my daily commute much more enjoyable.

1. Control button position: You’re right, and making the buttons/list easier to use is on my punch list.

2. “If I put in 0 for starting hit points” … where? On the Manage Creatures tab when making a new creature?

3. Delay flags: you’re right again, and I’ll try to fix that one before my next D&D session (9/12).

4. Moving actors around in the initiative order is a little bit tricky. I will work on this. You’re right: the DM should have easy control over where the character coming out of a delay state lands.

5. Customized monsters: all that FightCard imports from the Compendium is name, initiative modifier, hit points, and ID code (for linking back to the stat block). For customized monsters, you can save a PDF or image file from the Monster Builder, or open a Compendium monster, save the HTML source, and edit that. Put that PDF, JPEG/PNG, or HTML file in the Reference folder. Then you can link to that local file. Of course, FightCard can’t read any data from a PDF or JPEG/PNG file, or even a local HTML file. But it can link to those files so you have one-click reference during play. You’ll still have to type in the initiative modifier and starting HP—I don’t know any elegant way to avoid that.

I think putting the control buttons at the bottom (previous, next, and clear delays) is a poor interface choice, forcing the user to scroll to the bottom of the actor list every time someone finishes a turn. I would either put the buttons at the top, on the side, or put the list in a fixed size control that can be scrolled itself.

I noticed that if I put 0 in for starting hit points, the list shows it as “NaN” and you can’t add or subtract to fix it. You have to end combat and fix the creature/player record.

At the end of a round, check to see if there are any delay flags set before prompting the user to clear them.

When you clear someone’s delay flag, it puts them at the bottom of the current initiative value. So if you have multiple actors with the same initiative value, the actor that was delaying gets inserted after all of them. It should be possible to insert either before or after the current actor.

Things I like: That it allows you to prompt for player initiatives when you start combat, and the easy interface for tracking HPs. I haven’t had a chance to try the compendium integration yet, but I like the idea. Is there a way I could include info for customized monsters? Editing XML in local files I suppose?