I was reading a post over on 15mm Madness about TreeLine, a really neat FREE tool for storing all sorts of info in XML format. I thought I'd share the following with you...
The author Steve is using TreeLine for building orbats for a computer moderated gaming project (which looks awesome I must say!). I thought I'd give it a go for building Shako II orbats as my current stuff is all done in MS Word and a tad cumbersome to say the least.
Let me just say TreeLine kicks orbat ass. I knocked out my whole orbat for a French 1807 force based on Ney's VI Corps at Friedland in under two hours. I'd never used the tool before and the time spent included setting up all my unit types, pinching some icons from a video game to jazz it up AND entering all my data.
Here's the result...
I've configured TreeLine to print all the relevant unit summary data along with the force structure. When I play larger battles I can print nodes of the tree to give to divisional or corps commanders to keep their commands simple to manage.
Now there are plenty of other tools out there, some free and some commercial. I've purchased / downloaded and tried quite a few and they each have their merits BUT I have yet to come across something so simple, flexible and intuitive as TreeLine. The fact it's free makes it a no-brainer.
Have a go, you won't look back...
Cheers,
Millsy
Thanks for the post Millsy, really glad it worked out for this as well. Isnt it neat !
ReplyDeleteTreeLine is free as in free-beer, but its also free as in free-speech, being supplied with the all the source code and all that. Thats quite an important feature.
And if you do happen to look at all the source code, its incredibly compact and elegant. One of the best written apps I think I have ever seen. Total brilliance !
Just to re-iterate, TreeLine is written by Doug from bellz.org :
http://www.bellz.org/progs.html
Thanks also for the comments on the computer moderated system - Im very excited by the work, and really starting to get into it now. I have it to the point now where the little men on the table start communicating back with the player via written messages full of desperation ... and that adds a surreal layer of 'realism' that hadnt occurred to me before. The damn figures are starting to come to life !
Cant wait to get it all finished up and online for people to play with.
Cheers
"The damn figures are starting to come to life !"
ReplyDeleteWell the little buggers have been running my life (or at least the finances and spare time aspects) for the best part of 30 years! ;-)