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15-May-2005:

A year changes a lot.

First, the most pressing news: Grapevine has no virus. Many antivirus programs flag it as having one, unfortunately, because of the SMTP e-mail component it uses. Some virus writers also like to use this component, evidently, so antivirus programs think Grapevine is their work.

To fix this issue, I'm releasing Grapevine 3.0 Revision 1 -- a version of Grapevine with its e-mail functions disabled. If you've had trouble downloading or installing Grapevine because of your antivirus software, try this.

In other news: the New World of Darkness.

I began rewriting Grapevine for the new World of Darkness, but creative block stalled its development. (Did you know programmers could get that?) I've been taking time off for a while to work on other creative endeavors.

I will return to Grapevine after the new Mind's Eye Theater books and Mage: the Awakening are out, and determine then how to proceed.

As an aside to fellow programmers:

I realized as I was working on Grapevine that the code hasn't been aging well. Visual Basic 6.0 is all but obsolete these days, and the program's structure creaks beneath the burden of a completely different game system.

I'm on the verge of releasing the Grapevine 3.0 source code to the public, but nobody really needs that. I didn't. And designing from first principles will result in a stronger architecture than retrofitting the old model.

Father Wolf is old. Are his children nigh?

3-Jan-2004:

Happy New Year, Grapevine Users!

All's well with me on the 9-to-5 front, and I've even had time to put together the latest Menu Update. A special thanks goes out to Brian Hirvela, who e-mailed me the Vampire by Gaslight additions, and to Alan Cardy and Edward Ryan for continuing to let me borrow their books. Tribebook: Stargazers, TB: Uktena and TB: Wendigo are also in the update this time. Look below in the October 27 posting for instructions on merging this update into your current menu files.

27-Oct-2003:

The latest files of interest to Grapevine users:

• A Menu Update is available that will insert the new MET data from Guide to the Anarchs and Tribebook: Silver Fangs. From the menu editor screen, choose the File Information tab, click the Merge/Update Menus button, and select the .gvu file to make these changes. Or, download the menus.zip archive and replace your Grapevine Menus.gvm file with the one it contains.

• The second edition of the Grapevine NPC Library -- now with nearly 500 NPCs! I broke it into smaller pieces by creature type (and, for the vampires, by sect as well) to make it more manageable. Thanks to Anna Blumstein, John Givens, Zoe Mora, Shawn Neilsen and Adam Zielinski for their contributions!

On the personal front -- I am employed! I began a new job programming for Wells Fargo today. I've had a long painful struggle with unemployment, and it is a relief and a triumph that I am being given this opportunity. I'll make the most of it.

Don't worry -- Grapevine will still be an important priority in my life! Fortunately, it looks like the updates for a while are pretty light. You all seem very happy with the features available in Grapevine 3.0. It's next year, when Mind's Eye Theater 2.0 comes out (no, I don't know any more than you do!) that I'll really have to start thinking about big changes!

5-Sept-2003:

Presenting: the first edition of the Grapevine NPC Library!

There are nearly 200 characters in this game file, mostly vampires and mortals with a smattering of others. Every power level is represented, from the most basic starting-level character to those that might give Caine a run for his money.

These NPCs are springboards for your ideas: they benefit from being modified to fit the needs of your story. Use the Data Exchange feature of Grapevine to move the most promising ideas into your own game file.

Many thanks to the Storytellers who contributed to this edition -- Andy Knudsen, Shuniqua Rodriguez, John Snyder, Ray Terry, and Brandon Wallace. The rest of you -- enjoy! And please consider making contributions to the library yourself!

2-Jun-2003:

I have one new project and one new announcement:

First, the project is a little idea I'm calling the Grapevine NPC Library. Storytellers, send me your NPCs! I'll collect them into .gex files and make them available here for Storytellers everywhere to download and use in their own games. I imagine that just browsing through this library will give you ideas for new plots and new antagonists, not to mention relieve you of the burden of statting out the NPCs themselves.

Just use the Data Exchange feature of Grapevine to package your NPCs into a .gex file and e-mail it to me. If you want to take credit for your creations, be sure to add your name to their Notes field. The Notes and Biography fields are good places to record story and roleplaying hints as well.

I'll make the collection available as soon as the contributions start rolling in. Let's see how big a selection we can amass!

Second, I'm also opening up the site for another type of contribution. Users have sometimes commented that they'd like to express thanks for Grapevine in a financial way. Now to make that possible, I've put a Donate link in place. I am humbly grateful to all of you who would choose to use it.

19-May-2003:

Grapevine Version 3.0 is complete.

This version is basically identical to the beta version, with a few small changes:

• The bug that made it impossible to send e-mail to players whose names included commas has been fixed.
• The Rumors output bug has been fixed, so that influence rumors of Level 2 and above are now included in reports.
• An option was added to include e-mailed HTML/text documents as attachments instead of inline with the e-mail.
• When an SMTP error occurs during the sending of multiple e-mail messages, an Abort/Retry/Ignore dialog appears instead of terminating the entire operation immediately.
• E-Mail addresses can now be accessed through character searches, allowing searches to be constructed that include or exclude characters whose players have no e-mail available.

Ideas and suggestions continue to be welcome: I'll be considering which to include in Grapevine version 3.1. But before I get to 3.1, I'm taking a few months' break from active development. Grapevine has been just about all I've worked on for the better part of a year, and I'm taking a vacation! I will continue to provide support, respond to questions, and fix bugs as they arise, so rest assured I won't be idle. E-mail me as always with your thoughts, or join in on the forums.

Thank you all so much for your encouragement and support. This is the fulfillment of a major goal that I've long looked forward to. Game on!

30-Apr-2003:

• You can't e-mail players whose names contain commas. The comma in a player's name confuses my SMTP parser, which then tries to divide the name into multiple e-mail addresses.
  Workaround: Rename your players so that their names don't contain commas.
  
  
• Characters' Influence Rumors list only level 1. This bug crept in while I was rewriting some rumor algorithms -- I left out a loop! I am very sorry for the inconvenience.
  Workaround: For now, you'll have to bring a Master Rumor Report to game. Players with higher-level Influence rumors can look at the relevant portions.

27-Apr-2003:

2.4/3.0 BETA is ready for your administrative pleasure.

What do I mean by 2.4-slash-3.0 BETA? I mean only that I'm changing the number. The 2.4 ALPHA numbering scheme has been confusing. The next release, therefore, will be called Grapevine 3.0. This preceding release is the beta for that.

The new features you'll find in this revision are the following:

• Complete Faith and Fire compatibility (thanks Ed!), including a "Dark Ages Menus.gvm" file tailored for your Dark Ages games
• E-Mail character sheets and reports directly to your players' inboxes
• Effortlessly update your custom menus by merging in the file "Beta Menu Update.gvu" to bring them up-to-date
• A Permanent/Temporary Rating management window for updating your characters' Willpower, Glamour, Renown
• Vampire Boons and Status management window for the use of Harpies everywhere
• Random basic trait generation and point-counting tools
• More statistics information in reports and in the program
• A right-click pop-up menu for trait lists allowing you to add random traits, change displays, etc.

If you're having trouble updating your menus or setting up Grapevine for use with e-mail, log in to the Grapevine Forums -- I have little doubt I will soon be posting detailed explanations there. :)

I'm through adding major new features to Grapevine for a while, so now is the time to weigh in on last-minute tweaks and minor features! After all the bugs are ironed out over the next month, I'm going to relax for a while...!

28-Mar-2003:

• Those users having a problem with character sheets refusing to print or save should no longer have that problem.
• The program will no longer crash upon setting up certain Statistics Reports for output.
• Custom menu files should once again load with the associated game file.
• Choosing "Custom Template..." from the dropdown menu on the output window should no longer claim that the loaded template is not found.
• Autosave should no longer crash the program in certain cases where it interrupts other data processing.
• The [dot] keyword now works as intended with Trait displays when the specified dot contains HTML code or formatted RTF.
• Users who upgrade from a previous revision of 2.4 will no longer have program crashes when they attempt to select Active Players.

• An Influence Report. If you have saved your game in revision 7, you will have to load this .gex file to install the new template in your game file (or else create a new report manually from the Template tab of the output window).
• Text between [ST] and [/ST] tags may be permitted to appear in the saved and printed output.
• HTML code specified within the game file (like a line in a Notes field enclosed in <B>bold tags</B>) may be applied to the output instead of displayed literally.
• Tribebook: Silent Striders Revised information.

11-Mar-2003:

Revision 7 has taken the stage, sporting sleek new printing and exporting abilities in three formats (HTML, RTF and text), including new character sheets and 18 other kinds of reports. It's user-extensible, so you can even use Grapevine to generate new reports of your own design. See the Grapevine User's Guide and Template Keywords Reference for more information!

The main caveat is this: the old template files (Name Template.rtf) don't work with the new revision. For most of you this won't be a problem, but some of you will have to re-do the work you've done on your templates. The good news is that the new keyword language is highly similar to the old one, so you'll have it figured out again in no time. Not to mention you'll all want to start working in HTML anyway. :)

Other additions this time around include:

• Hunters (from Laws of the Reckoning)
• Demons (in anticipation of the inevitable Laws of the Fallen)
• Temporary and Permanent ratings for Willpower, Gnosis, Glamour and the like -- just click the rating to turn Temporary editing on or off
• New Experience Management Tools including XP histories moved to the character sheets, an editable list of Standard XP Awards, and an Attendance View to manage them
• Trait Maximums for Physical, Social and Mental Traits
• Redesigned Player Information windows
• Extra Security and Umbra information for Locations
• A speed increase for the Menu Editor, including the additions of categories you can use to classify the menus
• A Biography field for all characters
• And more!

So what's next? First, a bit of vacation: I'm going to be back in Rochester, NY, for seven days starting on Friday, and the weekend after that I'll be roleplaying my fuzzy Werewolf heart out in Winona, MN. And then I get to work turning Grapevine ALPHA into a Grapevine BETA. There's just a few more additions in the works.

15-Dec-2002:

The Chronicle Menu is open for business.

Revision 6 of the Grapevine 2.4 ALPHA marks the debut of powerful new tools for managing complex LARP downtime. Record characters' downtime actions with cues taken from Dark Epics. Deliver rumors not only to characters with Influence, but to characters who meet nearly any set of search criteria. Weave ongoing threads of plot between the two. Interconnect each action, plot development and rumor so that you know exactly who's affecting what parts of the world and how.

This is brand-new stuff, and it's intricate enough to warrant a steepish learning curve. So crack open the revised Grapevine User's Guide for instructions and examples about how to employ the Chronicle tools to their fullest.

Printing and exporting, unfortunately, is still in an interim phase: so at the moment all the output you'll get out of Grapevine's Chronicle capabilities is crude plain-text reports for characters and staff. Not pretty, but they'll get the job done until I finish the next phase of development: printing and reporting.

Thanks to Dave Edwards and his Laws of the Ascension Companion, you'll find your Rotes nearly doubled and plenty of Artifacts to go with 'em. Look for other fun tidbits too: New security and Umbra details on Location cards, and a new option in the Game Preferences that'll try to guess the next Experience History entry to write as you update character sheets.

As always, please experiment and let me know what you think! The Forums and my feedback page are open 24/7!

6-Nov-2002:

Thanks to the help of Brandon M., Grapevine has a new users' forum! This forum replaces the old EZBoard site, plagued as it was by pop-ups and other clunkiness, with a sleek new phpBB setup hosted on Brandon's server. I intend to keep abreast of this forum far better than the last one.

Registering an account for posting on the board is free and harmless (the information is used only for administrating the board and for nothing else), and it should be a good place for you all to exchange techniques for using Grapevine, to communicate with me and to discuss LARP in general. Welcome and enjoy.

3-Nov-2002:

Welcome to the new URL! My RIT account is due to expire, so I made the move to my own domain. Special thanks to Ross Anderson for donating the server space and for settling me into it! I can now be reached at Adam@GrapevineLARP.com.

Enter stage right: Items, Rotes and Locations. The World menu of Grapevine 2.4 Alpha is functional as of revision 5. Experiment and see how it handles! The only incomplete feature is printing and exporting these new entities: right now only plain-text format is available. An overhaul for all the printing and exporting functions is two phases in the future, so I didn't want to do a lot of work now that I'd just have to scrap in a few weeks.

You'll also notice other little tweaks like a graphical toolbar and a revamped Data Exchange window. The newly-enabled Merge command uses the Last Modified dates in two files to discard older entities, giving multiple STs a means of resolving multiple copies of the same file.

I've also updated the menu file to incorporate Hengeyokai and a number of menus required for Items, Rotes and Locations to work. If you don't care about Hengeyokai and just want to preserve your customized menus, back up your work using XML format and paste this into it.

Next on my plate -- the long-awaited Action, Plot and Rumor system!

13-Oct-2002:

Revision 4 has a little math bug that keeps you from loading a revision-3 or earlier menu file with it. If you use a customized menu, that's a problem. Fortunately, the workaround is quick and easy! Just open your menu file in Notepad and change the second line from this:

<grapevinemenus version="2.39">

to this:

<grapevinemenus version="2.39" size="1000">

Voila, bug avoided. This'll be fixed in revision 5.

12-Oct-2002:

Revision four -- the Speed Revision! This one goes out with love to everyone with older computers who wondered if Grapevine would *always* take so darn long to load. I spent this week speeding everything up as much as I could. While 2.4A will never be quite as fast as 2.3, since it works with much more complex data, I think you'll still be pleased with the results.

XML is no longer the default file format, although it is still fully supported. I added a proprietary binary format to improve the speed and shink the file sizes. Any time you save a file, check the "Save as Type" dropdown list in the file dialog to choose the format you'd like to use.

Also added: Mage factions, Garou camps, Active flags for players, Experience History comments, and slightly tweaked character sheet templates.

8-Oct-2002:

Grapevine 2.4 ALPHA is presently in its third revision. A couple minor file-loading bugs and the major Experience History bug that crashed the program have been fixed. But most importantly, Grapevine now has powerful new search capabilities! With the new Search window and Statistics window, you can, for example:

• Find all active vampires and sort them by Generation.
• Find all characters with the Nightmares flaw, the Oracular Ability merit or the Sight from Beyond Gift so you know where to sow those new plot seeds.
• Examine the distribution, maxima and sum totals of all the Influence in your game.
• ..and much more! The new tools are truly powerful, if I do say so myself!

You'll also notice that the Characters window is now a little more colorful -- the list is detailed with information about Clan and Sect, Tribe and Auspice, and so on, and (ooh!) the Vampire icon even looks a little less lame now. :)

Hopefully you'll see work on this project pick up the pace a bit. I'm now working on Grapevine a solid 4+ hours every weekday. Next I plan to tackle the speed issues and the items/locations: following a release with those improvements, the new action/plot/rumor system: and last of all, improved Printing capabilities. Thanks for your patience as always!

2-Sep-2002:

A second revision of the Grapevine 2.4 ALPHA is on the web now; it should correct that pesky -247352560 bug that kept the Game Information window from working. It also fixes a bug that caused a failure to save the contents of Notes fields and the like when you clicked a tab immediately after editing them. Thanks to Nancy Z. for finding and reproducing that problem!

Plus, this revision also updates Mummy for use with Laws of the Resurrection.

If you've been using the first revision of 2.4 ALPHA these last several weeks, I don't anticipate any problem with just installing the new one right over top of it. But to be totally safe, you might want to uninstall the old before reinstalling the new. It's fully compatible with your previous .gv2 files.

And to reiterate a point, as it wasn't clear the first time -- because this is only an ALPHA release of version 2.4, many parts of it don't work quite yet. Most conspicuously, the World and Chronicle menus are non-functional. I'm still working on the pieces that will make Item Cards, Rotes, Influence Actions and Rumors possible. But since many users employ Grapevine chiefly as a character database anyhow, I figured the Alpha would be of some use even in its current incomplete form. Thanks for your patience!

16-Aug-2002:

It's not done -- but it's getting there. And here's the sneak peek.

I provide Grapevine 2.4 ALPHA so that my users may experiment with it. It has bugs, and those bugs may cause problems. If the functionality of Grapevine 2.3 is sufficient for you, consider continuing to rely upon 2.3. But if the character-tracking improvements of 2.4A tempt you, I believe you'll get a lot of mileage with them; I cannot, however, make any guarantees.

I'll start with the bad news first. Grapevine 2.4 ALPHA can not yet work with Rumors and Influences. If your game depends on Grapevine for these, stick to 2.3 for now.

The good news is that 2.4 ALPHA can do all the other jobs 2.3 can do. Moreover, it is improved in the following areas:

• Ordered Disciplines (basic-to-advanced)
• Point Costs on Merits and Flaws
• Detailed Experience Point Tracking
• Full Compatibility with all MET material just short of Laws of the Resurrection (haven't been able to read that one yet)
• A Built-In Menu Editor means no more hacking the .DAT files
• The .gv2 File Format is now in XML, for the benefit of you web monkeys

Like Grapevine 2.3, 2.4 ALPHA can save and print character sheets, swap characters via .gex files, and perform all the player-tracking functions you've come to know and love.

So if your curiousity is piqued, by all means give it a try! Be sure to read the instructions on the download page closely. You'll find important information there that I didn't want to reproduce on this page.

(And a shout out to my homedawgs at Chapel Hill!)

12-Nov-2001:

In an effort to keep you all informed while I'm out of touch -- here's what's going on.

The short version is, I'm still a long way from done with all the features I want to include. In recognition of that, I'm working on restoring functions like printing to my working copy, and I'll release it as version 2.4 Alpha when I do. It'll be nearly as fully-functional as Grapevine 2.3, with the exception of Rumors and Influence use -- which are in the midst of being replaced with a new system.

The long version is this.

As I was growing up, adults always told me that school, particularly college, would be the best time of my life. They've been right so far. I love the friendships and the lifestyle that the last five years have given me. But there was a disservice done in all those grownups' glowing endorsements of this chapter in the book: they never praised the chapter to come.

My master's project is the last page of this chapter. When I finish it, I graduate: I leave behind school, Rochester, friends, and a kind of freedom. I don't know what comes next, except for the fact that all along I've been told by elimination that it won't be the best time of my life. So I'm terrified. I drag my feet the closer I get to the end, and Grapevine has been an unfortunate casualty of my reluctance.

But I can't live like this forever. I'll really, actually finish soon. There's even a really great job programming for the Game Boy Advance that I may have a shot at. I'm about to undergo a time of radical transition, and that'll distract me from Grapevine as well. But I am committed to Grapevine; in fact, it'll be one of the few threads of continuity I'll have in the next several months.

So I guess I just want to thank you all for your patience, and humbly ask for more. I thank you all for your offers of help, and someday I may take you up on it; but at the moment, Grapevine is too incomplete for any kind of open source release. Your gratitude for this work means a lot to me, and I don't intend to disappoint.

10-Sep-2001:

As I'm sure many of you have noticed, I've been a bit out of touch while working on this whole Master's Project thing. And compounding this is the fact that I'm running later than planned. I can only beg your patience! The project itself is almost done -- I ended up paring it down to a subset of the new features, instead of all of them -- but Grapevine still has a way to go. I may be pushing into October, finishing the new stuff.

The good news is, my in-progress copy of Grapevine has a lot of exciting new features fully implemented! It's using the XML file format now, a highly readable format that will be much easier for my programming users to work with. Merits and Flaws have point costs added, and all lists of powers like Disciplines appear in order. Experience points now track both unspent and total earned experience, and the XP History feature works more like a spreadsheet than like a text field.

Of course, the bad news is, I've had to disable about every other feature in the program to incorporate these changes so far. :) So I can't release what I've got so far, seeing as how it lacks little capabilities like printing. But within the next month, printing will be back, with more power; I'll be adding more searching and reporting functions; the Rumor/ Influence Use system will be radically overhauled into something totally new; and you'll be able to populate your game with Items and Locations as well as characters.

Good things come to those who wait! Thanks for your support!

1-Jul-2001:

James T. pointed out that the below Mortal Menus.dat problem exists in Kuei-Jin Menus.dat as well. In sheepishness for this, I have only the Oxford English Dictionary's newest expletive to say-- Doh! I'll have fixed files up on Monday, though you can correct them in the same manner as described below.

On another note, I just got a copy of Laws of the Wyld Revised. Before you ask -- Yes, I will incorporate it into Grapevine. But wow -- the book is changed. Bewilderingly so. There are good points and bad points, neither of which I feel like expounding upon at length right now. Its biggest impact on Grapevine, other than the menu overhauls, is the change from Renown Traits to the permanent/temporary tabletop renown system. Don't worry -- I like Traits, so I'll keep it backward-compatible.

12-Jun-2001:

Kallethen recently pointed out in the Forums that there's an error in the new Mortal Menus.dat file! The line in the file that reads

   >End Flesh Shintai

   <End Flesh Shintai

7-Jun-2001:

Firstly -- no, there's not a new version yet. Just an overdue new site design in anticipation of one!

To tide you all over, and bring Grapevine a bit more up-to-date with almost a year's worth of MET products, there are new menu files available for you to download and unzip into your Grapevine directory.

This summer, Grapevine has my complete attention. In fact, my college degree hinges on it -- Grapevine is now part of my Master's Project! School can't get in the way of working on it anymore, because now it is school! Look closely and you'll find the mostly-finished Grapevine 2.4 User's Guide online. Its pages hold the details of all the new functionality I hope to incorporate into the program.

I am several months backed-up on my Grapevine e-mail -- I'll be attending to that presently. But I have also created an ezboard forum for all you Grapevine users to trade notes, ask questions, et cetera; I figure that even if I can't always reply to questions promptly, at least the community of LARPers and users might be able to help. Give it a look once in a while!

Content of these pages (c) 2002 Adam Cerling. All rights reserved.