Appendix D:

Support and Tools Development

Support:

MythoLogical Software provides the Dragon Bane II Adventure Construction Kit (DB2ACK) for free, and therefore no formal support is provided. All questions should be addressed to the Dragon Bane II Yahoo Web Forum. There, you will be able to ask, answer, or search for answers to common questions related to the Adventure Construction Kit. We welcome your feedback and comments on the Yahoo forum, where others can read and provide feedback on your input. We will make an attempt to monitor that forum and reply to questions that go unaswered for a while, but in most cases, we will not answer questions or address comments posed directly to us.

That being said, we do intend to aggressively support the DB2ACK, and will attempt to make sure questions find answers, bugs are fixed, and provide general support to developers. We intend to support DB2ACK users by providing help to programmers who wish to improve the development tools, sponsoring contests with prizes for the best adventures created, as well as possible promotion or co-marketing of authors' adventures.

Tools Development:

Although MythoLogical Software only plans to provide bugfix support for the DB2ACK, it would not be too hard for third parties or users to improve the tools or port them to other platforms. MythoLogical Software will offer assistance in advice and source code to anyone who shows a serious interest in, and ability to improve or port the DB2ACK.

One useful improvement would be to bring all the separate data elements under a single integrated development environment. With all data elements controlled by a master editor, there would be no need for users to maintain separate listsof data elements. The master program could keep it's own sorted lists in memory and reference object names, for example, when placing them inside maps, or reference spell names, when associating spells with a spell weapon. Then before the adventure is to be compiled, the IDE could output the simple sets of indexed text files used by our existing mkpdbs compiler. We think it would be great to have a web based or java based IDE for the DB2ACK that runs on any platform, and comes with a nice GUI

Another common request we've heard is to port the DB2ACK tools to the Mac platform. We will probably provide a port for Mac OS X ourselves, though we don't have plans to do bug fixes or support older OS versions ourselves, though it should not be difficult for a third party to support these simple tools on the Mac. Our tools are in plain C, and come with simple Makefiles (no need to deconstruct the source from a Visual Studio project file) and do not use any windows-specific libraries. Mapedit requires the curses.lib, which is readily available for the Mac as well as other platforms.

If you are interested in improving or porting DB2ACK tools, please email us your proposal.

Disclaimer:

THE SOFTWARE AND DOCUMENTATION ARE PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, NONINFRINGEMENT OR FITNESS FOR PARTICULAR USE OR PURPOSE.

IN NO EVENT SHALL MYTHOLOGICAL SOFTWARE OR ITS SUPPLIERS OR RESELLERS BE LIABLE TO YOU OR ANY OTHER PERSON FOR ANY INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OF ANY KIND INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS OR DATA, ARISING OUT OF THIS AGREEMENT OR USE OF THE SOFTWARE.