Genesis 5 with SR6 – Public Beta

Verfasser: taranion | Datum: 30.09.2019 | Kategorie(n): Major release, Roleplaying games, Shadowrun

After 5 months of developing, nearly 100.000 lines of code and data, I think it is time to release the newest addition to Genesis – the support for Shadowrun 6 – to the friendly user public. The software should be stable enough to build and level-up your SR6 characters, though I am pretty sure there are enough bugs left, which I hope to find with your help.

For those of you completely new to Genesis: Genesis is an offline character generation software – similar to Chummer5 for SR5. It supports multiple RPGs – Space 1889 (Ubiquity), Coriolis and now SR6 are available in english – and runs on Windows, Linux or OS X.

This software is available at no cost. It is a fan-project written by my wife and me, which we started five years ago. We made most of the code available under an Open Source License and welcome contributors, though except for the german RPG Splittermond, in the past I have been the only developer. I haven’t made my homework for publishing the source code for SR6 yet, so I will get back to this when I did that.

For now I need your help testing the software and report bugs back to me. Download Genesis 5 Beta here and follow the installation instructions on that page. If you find bugs – and I fear you will – please use our BitBucket (Comparable to GitHub, where does the same) issue tracker. Include a description that will help me reproduce the bug and if you consider it helpful, add screenshots or add the XML file of your character (usually found below the ‘rpgframework/players/myself/shadowrun6‘ subdirectory of your users home directory).

The current state of the software is Beta – meaning I added all the features I intended for a first release and at least 2 or 3 users except me gave the software a try and reported errors which I fixed (while I was working on the features). Every time I run the software I am noticing minor problems (e.g. in the layout) and – this is my main concern – problems that originate in changes I made very recently. So I have the nagging feeling that there are some things broken, but I don’t know where. That is where you come in.

I hope to have a fairly stable and correct working version to the end of October, together with the official release of the printed CRB for SR6 and the official release of the german translation of SR6 through Pegasus Spiele.
It is worth mentioning, that Pegasus Spiele kindly supported us with a CRB ahead of time and provided a contact for rule clarifications. German players will get the chance to enhance functionality of Genesis for SR6 by buying a software license key from Pegasus, which will allow showing/printing spell descriptions, quality descriptions and the like. My attempts to contact CGL for a similiar deal have remained unanswered so far.

For those of you who use their computer running on a german language operating system: Genesis will show you a mixture of german and english. This is because we just started with the german translation and aren’t finished yet. You could switch to English in the settings or simply live with it for this Beta.

Activity around SR6 the since May