Feature Complete

HMK Toolkit version 1.1 was a massive effort on my part and a push for more visibility for the app. The landing page was redesigned to be much more appealing and “convincing” to potential users. The documentation was also redesigned to be much more accessible and logically organized.

The only two things that were still on my "must-have" list were PDF export and masterwork armour articles. Today I am releasing version 1.1.1 which includes those two features.

PDF Export

This is something that I absolutely needed personally. I use HMK Toolkit for my campaign and all my players except one are on Windows. That means that they use the editable character sheet PDF, which is fine of course, but it also means that I can't help them with something like a new configuration of their armour very easily. Well, now I can just make changes to their characters in HMK Toolkit, press a button, and send them a PDF of the full character sheet. It's not editable, of course, but they can reference it for filling the one they have.

This was not an easy feature to implement, I must say, but it's totally worth it. The PDF is identical to what you see in HMK Toolkit.

Masterwork Armour Articles

The second thing I had on my "must-have" list was masterwork armour articles. HMK Toolkit already had all the masterwork weapons, but none of the armour articles. I don't use the optional armour maintenance rules on page 133 personally, so HMK Toolkit doesn't track armour quality. Masterwork armour articles do have increased armour values every two steps though. Of course the MW version has a social effect.

Feature Complete

With this latest release, I think HMK Toolkit is feature complete. What that means is that I think that there aren’t any more features to add. I will, of course, fix bugs and perhaps add a few missing items as needed, but I don't think I will add any new features. I will also make sure it works with future macOS releases.

I must say the response to version 1.1 was not totally as I expected it. It’s only been one week as I write this, so I need to give it more time, but, at the moment, there has been zero reaction on the discord dedicated to the app aside from a couple emojis in the last few days.

To put things in context, as of version 1.1, the code base for HMK Toolkit stood at 54,999 lines of code. This last update to 1.1.1 brings it up to 60,529 lines of code. This is represented by only two lines in the release notes (PDF export and masterwork armour articles), but it's a huge amount of work on my part, and that's not considering updating the online documentation.

Don't get me wrong, making a public version was very rewarding on many counts. It pushed me towards making a better application. And making the online documentation is a great "rubber ducking" exercise, which often made me realize mistakes or omissions I had made. I also had great feedback from a few people in the beginning.

But it also took a lot longer than if I had only made this for myself. In any case, I am very proud of what I accomplished, and I am very happy if it helps even one person.