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An open letter to Ed_NBOS: Please consider the future of Inspiration Pad Pro
This is an open letter, addressed to Ed_NBOS, creator of Inspiration Pad Pro, The Keep and many other RPG software tools that any of us still use and swear by. I'm a 55yr old IT professional, I've been around since the birth of personal computing, having seen things develop from home microcomputers, PCs, the Internet, mobile phones and tablets, the Cloud and now AI. The first computer I used to support my RPG hobby was an 8086...the current one I am using is a Chromebook. I think it's fair to say that where technology and the hobby intersect, change is a constant.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that in my opinion, Inspiration Pad Pro is the most criminally underrated and underutilised tool in the RPG marketplace. There are other tools out there to make and use random tables in RPGs, but nothing that I've seen can compete with the power and flexibility of the IPP scripting language, in a neat windows-friendly package. Every GM should have it in their toolbox, and YouTube should be filled with tips and tricks to make the most of it.
But here's the problem, and I say this with deep respect and the perspective of an IT veteran, bordering on dinosaur myself. It's old. I don't know what coding language or development environment you used to create it, but not only does the look and feel scream early 2000s, but we're approaching the point where we're beginning to struggle to run it on today's computing platforms. I've run into this struggle trying to get IPP running on my new Chromebook, we've seen the APK of the Android version be blocked from running on current phones and tablets. There will come a time when the Windows installer won't run on the latest Windows OS, because Microsoft have finally dropped some vital element of legacy support.
I won't say "you're not getting any younger" but... :-)
I get that NBOS is a one-man show and it's unreasonable to expect you to devote the time needed to constantly patch and port to multiple platforms any of your products, much less the one you make available for free. But as things stand, at some point in the not too distant future, IPP is going to be lost to the hobby world and that's a crying shame, as there's nothing out there that can match it.
But one thing we have seen in recent years is how internet community projects can produce software that can wipe the floor with the biggest commercial operations. Probably a good 75% of the software I use comes from open-source or non-commercial projects. GIMP, Paint.NET, LibreOffice, Inkscape, Audacity... I could go on. And in the videogame world we've seen many free mods and projects that rival or exceed the corporate offerings, like Sim Settlements or Fallout London.
So with the greatest respect for all the work you've done and your ownership of the property, I ask you: Please consider making Inspiration Pad Pro into Open Source product, Or if not, at least open it up to a community effort to continue its development and bring it into the modern world. I'm not asking for myself - while over the years I've dabbled in what we used to call "programming", I know that modern software development is not in my wheelhouse. (I do however volunteer to write documentation and tutorials for the project, should it come to pass) But I'm sure there are others out there with the required skillsets who would leap at the chance to keep IPP alive and carry it into the 2030s.
If you've got this far, thank you for your time and consideration. And I invite everyone with an interest in IPP to comment below, whether you feel you could contribute to an open-source IPP, or are just a dedicated user like me who would dearly love to see it survive and thrive, and maybe get some of the wider recognition it deserves.
Comments
User who agrees wholeheartedly here. It's time to open the project up to the world, I think.
Came here to ask why Prompt doesn't seem to be working on my machine. I remember it used to, back during Windows 10? I'll still ask, but this post grabbed my attention.
I have seriously considered using AI and some intro Javascript lessons to try to hack together some IP Pro-like product with a few improvements. This idea is insane. I don't even know CSS. But it's a sign of how amazing this thing is.
Prompt is still working on my Windows 11 machine (and also Windows 10). Probably merits its own thread.
Personally, I program mainly in VB.net, so I don't know if that's relevant. Although I have faked my way through other languages successfully when I needed to. Is IPP written in... Delphi?
Well the intent was always to open source IPP. The time is whats been lacking. The engine I think would be easy enough, but the windows interface I believe uses a couple commercial components, so they would have to be removed.
Inspiration Pad Pro is written in Delphi. The engine also compiles in FreePascal - that's how the Linux command line & Android app are made. The Android app is a java app that uses jni to call functions in whats basically a linux library. There's a few Delphi to JavaScript compilers out there, I'd love to see if someone can get that working making IPP available natively in browsers.
Perhaps you could release the code base and let folks have a look. If security was a concern, you could let people contact you and get a code to access it.
If nothing else, I'd like to look under the hood to see how the program does what it does!
Ed - thanks for being open to the idea and not taking offence. I do hope this lights a spark and someone out there with the necessary coding chops can pick this up. Inspiration Pad Pro is such a great tool, it deserves to be kept alive and evolved.
I fully agree that decades old IPP is still the very best tool out there for what this community is using it for. I'd be one of a whole dozen users (lol) that would back this on crowd funding. Seriously, though, I'd spread the word to all the RPG community sites that I frequent to gain second dozen backers.
In addition to preserving the application for new OS, and a couple QoL updates (ctrl-x, I'm looking at you), I'd love to see new functionality for calling the program from - to use old-folk terms - a command prompt that would set generator prompt values, like the old style
C:\GenerateTreasure.ipt /3 /hoardto pass the value of 3 to $prompt1 and the value of "hoard" to $prompt2. With that (or the modern equivalent) we could easily write macros in our VTT platform of choice (Foundry VTT, Roll20, etc.) to run generators WITH PROMPTS from within other applications.Very excited that this discussion was initiated, and very excited that it has been met with at the very least thoughtful ideas of moving forward.
I agree, command line params for prompts would be useful.
A work around might be to wrap a bash script around the ipp executable, and use something like sed or awk to set the values in the ipt file directly before running it.
Do the VTT's allow calling outside URL's as a chat comman? Because yes, if they do, that would be... as I would say when I was younger... wicked.
I don't know if I can speak to the programming side of this thing, but IPP is seriously an amazing tool. As for updating... the prompt thing is kind of a problem. You can work around it in a real clunky, behind-the-scenes, not on the fly kind of way (have the prompts create a table that you manually turn into a table of variables and save so it can be referenced by other tables... is how I do it), but it's nothing that can happen on the fly. Even a program that did the input and saved it in a file that IPP could recognize would work.