About
e-mail: iociveteres@gmail.comgithub repository: https://github.com/iociveteres/CharacterSheet
I was frustrated with Roll20’s laggy sheets and general slowness, so I set out to build a better character sheet. After mostly pleasant coding, it’s ready with all features I desired.
I'm more proficient with backend, and decided to polish hard parts first: html and css for character sheet. Then added a bit of JavaScript for copy/paste, drag-and-drop and interactivity. I had an idea to give every data container an id and use paths like "notes -> note-1 -> name" that match both the HTML structure and the JSON in the database. That worked nicely and felt simpler than keeping a separate JS object and syncing it. I listen for and emit events with those paths and update fields via WebSocket. If I were to start over I’d pick a more common approach, since writing SQL queries against Postgres JSON fields turned out to be tricky.
At this point I had two parts: the character sheet with some JS and a server-rendered site with a Go backend handling authorization, emails, etc. The "room" feature, where these parts meet and players create sheets, invite others, change rights, chat and roll dice, needed much more interactivity. Imperative JS grew hard to manage, so I switched to AlpineJS for reactivity. It was a good move: implementing chat and other features became much easier and faster. That's the moment I understood benefits of reactivity, though complexity of the frontend still puzzles me.
Then I registered a domain and mail on it, rented a VPS, dockerized app and put it there.
I hope you find the site enjoyable and useful in your endeavors, loyal or chaotic.
I also made the full table of Pathfinder 1e spells, check it out here:
https://iociveteres.github.io/SpellTable-pf1e/