Armin Sykes is a simple man with a simple life.
While he usually refers to himself in the third person as Armin Sykes, he usually credits himself as Armin D. Sykes, and can often be found that way out on the ‘net.
Armin was born and raised in the state of Oregon, USA, with the vast majority of that time being in the greater Beaverton area. He attended Cedar Mill Elementary School, Cedar Park Junior High School, and Sunset High School (graduating in 1987) before traveling off to Oregon State University, whereupon he got sick and tired of higher education remarkably quickly, tried community college for a while, and finally dropped out entirely. He occasionally entertains thoughts of returning to college to finish his education, but that seems unlikely any time soon.
Armin currently runs Miser Software, his programming company. He is best known in a few small circles as the author of GURPS Character Assistant, a program for role-playing gamers who play the GURPS game system; and as a former moderator of RPG.net, the number one independent tabletop RPG-oriented web site.
See? Simple.
I recently discovere your solar system generator. Can you tell me what the element available codes are?
Thank you, Keith
Hi, Keith,
The element codes in SSG don’t correspond to anything in particular. They’re there so that Game Masters can assign each letter to a particular special element in their campaign. For example, they could assign D to Dilithium in a Star Trek campaign, if they wanted it to be pretty common, or they could assign Y to Dilithium if they wanted it to be pretty rare.
There is a bug in the code that has never been fixed, so that the letter A appears on every planet, so that’s not the most useful letter, but otherwise, the letters get increasingly more rare as you move down the alphabet.
Thanks for your interest,
Armin
Are you updating the Gurps Character Assistant? If so, what progress?
The current GCA has so many bugs, and crashes so often.
Love the solar system generator btw.
I didn’t know about it until I read Keith’s question.
Do you have a site that has anymore programs on it I can poke around with?
Hi there,
Yes, I am working on the new GCA. Progress is good, but it will still be some time before it becomes available. I’m working hard to find and kill the kinds of things that crash the current GCA. The new one is much speedier and more responsive, and I think looks nicer, too. But, so much of it is being rewritten that it’ll need a good proper shakedown to catch a lot of the new bugs. Once things are done, and we have a solid beta test of it, I think we’ll find it’s much more stable than GCA is now.
I post occasional build notes and previews at my GCA5 blog while I’m working on things.
Other than GCA, the only other page I currently have with gaming programs is the one with the Solar System Generator on it at my utilities page, and that’s really the only thing there, other than some old dice programs. My brother has a few D&D/Pathfinder ones at his web site. Solar System Generator has had a resurgence of interest lately. Maybe soon I’ll finally take a little time to update it to something more modern, and add in some features I’ve been thinking about.
Thanks for your interest.
I love GCA not just for RP but also to create characters for stories, (worked on at nap time and told at bed time, so no you won’t find my work anywhere soon). My household is currently in the process of slowly switching to Apple. Any chance your new GCA will also run on Mac?