• Tips & Tricks

• OpenRPG, being an Open-Source program, has had many contributions from many different people, and some of them are a lot less obvious than others. The purpose of this section is to point out some of them, and what they can do for you.

The TAB Key:

One of the most obscure tools is the TAB key. When you're typing in the chat window's text entry bar, you might have accidentally hit the Tab key, and noticed that OpenRPG posted either "No match found" or "That's the TAB key, Dave." As touching as it may be to your funnybone to be called Dave for hitting the tab key, it wouldn't seem very useful, but there is a function built into that TAB key just waiting to be used. It is called the name completion tool, and what it does is finish typing someone's name if you start typing it and then press the TAB key. For example, if a chatroom contained Brendan, mDuo13, and Heimdall, and you typed the letter "h" and pressed TAB, it would fill your text entry bar with "Heimdall: " right away. If you learn to use this well, you can address people by their correct names without having to figure out exactly WHAT their correct names are, and without having to type them out.

The Status Bar:

Another often-overlooked feature is the Status Bar tool. The developer tdb30_ coded this quickly, so it's not exactly beautiful, but it performs its functions well. You can access the Status Bar by going to the Tools menu and clicking Status Bar, or by pressing CTRL+T. The Status Bar has two modes, which you can access with the Switch To menu - it starts out in General mode, which tells you what server you are connected to, and also contains the current time in GMT (Greenwich mean time). The URL Display mode will show the address that a link points to when you hold your mouse over it, like many browsers also do. That way, if someone posts a link to chat and you want to double-check it before clicking, you can assure yourself that it is not a link to goats or something. (If you don't know, do not ask. Really.)

• The clock in the status bar is GMT because it can get confusing discussing play times with people in different locations that do or don't use Daylight savings time or are in another timezone

The UP and DOWN arrows:

Another tool which many OpenRPG users learn to use well is the UP arrow key. Similar to in IRC, if you press the UP arrow, OpenRPG will automatically set the chat text entry bar to be the exact same as your last message. If you keep pressing up, you'll go farther and farther back. You can use this to repeat yourself easily, or to correct statements you screwed up, without having to type the entire thing again. You can also use the DOWN arrow to scroll back down through the messages.

The PageUp and PageDown keys:

Though this was already mentioned in the chat window description, this is a good place to repeat it. If you press the PageUp key on your keyboard, you can view lines of chat that come before the beginning of your chat buffer. That way, you can keep a conveniently small chat buffer and still see things that have been pushed off the edge of it. PageDown, as you might expect, goes back down through the sections of your chat history, so you can get back to the current chat section. Note that if you send messages to chat while you're browsing the old pages, you may not see your message arrive on your screen, though it does.

GUI Layouts:

OpenRPG 1.4.1 and above include built-in support for the user to organize the OpenRPG components (map, chat, tree, and player list) in a multitude of different ways. Unfortunately, as of yet there is no way to design them without delving into the XML. However, if you're brave enough, you can go into your OpenRPG folder on your computer and open up the /myfiles/ directory. If you open the gui.xml file in a text editor (i.e. Notepad, ConTEXT, etc) and take a look, you'll see how the layouts work. By changing the hierarchy of the different components and splitters, you can change the way OpenRPG looks. If you're too timid to mess with the XML, or would rather just get pre-made layouts, <shamless plug> you can go to mDuo13's Plugin Headquarters and get some pre-made layouts. Also, if you look around on that site, you'll find some very interesting add-ons to OpenRPG. All the instructions should be on that page, and you can contact either mDuo13 or Woody if you're having problems getting things to work.</shameless plug>

Macro Keys:

If you have anything that you say often, you may finding yourself wishing that you could just press a key and make it appear. Well, actually, you can. In the settings menu, the final tab, Macro Keys, you can define a custom message to be sent whenever you press each of the 12 F keys at the top of your keyboard. You can put anything you would normally type there, from messages to name changes to common dice rolls.

/set *setting*:

If you happen to be a fast typist, you might decide that you would rather change your settings through the chat text entry page than by going to the Settings menu. You can actually do this quite quickly with the "/set *setting*" command, if you know the name of the setting you want to change. For example, your F1 macro is "F1". Note that as of OpenRPG 1.5.1, setting names for this command are case-sensitive.There are two uses of the "/set *setting*" command. First, if you just type "/set *setting*" (replacing *setting* with the name of the setting that you want to check) you can tell OpenRPG to tell you exactly what that setting is set to. But what about changing it? There is only a minor difference - just type "/set *setting*=*stuff*", where *stuff* is what you want to change the setting to. So if you want to change your F1 setting to be "OpenRPG rocks!" you would type: "/set F1=OpenRPG rocks!" Have fun changing all the settings you want! Do not forget the equals sign (=) !

Settings Descriptions:

If you see something in the settings menu (which you open by going to OpenRPG and clicking "Settings") that you do not understand, you can call up an explainatory pop-up message just by clicking on its name. This can be very handy for figuring out exactly what a certain setting does.

Pretty Print:

"Pretty Print" is an old style of viewing nodes, which is left over from OpenRPG version 0.9.4, when all character sheets were viewed as HTML. If you want to see an HTML version of a tree node, just right click it and hit Pretty Print. This can be used to view very old nodes, or, if you write HTML code in a text box, you can even see what it looks like.

Remote Node Loaders:

If you go to the Tools section of the Templates tab in your tree (Templates is under "OpenRPG 1.5") you will see a list of different tools, which includes the Remote Node Loader. Each of the items in the Templates section, with the exception of the groups, is a Remote Node Loader. If you open a Remote Node Loader in Design mode, you can set which file it links to. Then, you can keep a group of custom node loaders in your tree all the time, and thereby save yourself the trouble of having to find a particular file whenever you want to load it up. You can put pretty much anything on here - favorite characters, books in OpenRPG node format, campaign resources - it's all up to you.

This is by no means every single obscure feature in OpenRPG, but it covers a plethora of the more useful ones. And, of course, if you happen to be a programmer, do not forget to check out the best tool of all - the source code. Just opening any of the .py or .pyw files that makes up OpenRPG in a text editor lets you see the source, and you can even make some changes, save, and see what they do. If you're experienced in programming, even not in python, you can learn a lot about Python and OpenRPG just by looking at the source. If you're really interested, you can join the developer mailing list on sourceforge.net/projects/openrpg too. Good luck, and happy gaming!

Fast loading of maps and miniatures on dialup

I have a solution. I do it myself for the games I run. I have a miniatures and map package for the players, which includes a very small and preconfigured web server.

I run a web server on my PC, too. So, when we play, everyone runs the web server on their own PC, and all URLs for miniatures are like http://127.0.0.1/Miniatures/blabla.png

Everything loads from the local machine, so it's much faster for those on dial-up, and does not necesarily need a web site. My package is under 600 KB.

I recommend this server: http://xelectrox.homeip.net/martinh/www/files.htm

There is a Windows version.

• - Sheng Long Gradilla