RPTools began as an umbrella project to house MapTool.
Trevor was a java graphics programmer who did side work on an isometric MMO. His co-worker, giliath, was big into gaming with his brother, Mr. Ice. Their group used kLoOge but found it too cumbersome. The three coders got together and created the first version of MapTool. The original program was fairly basic. It was a background texture with a grid, that you could drag images onto and move around. The three were pretty excited the first time they connected internet clients together saw each other moving tokens around.
They decided to make MapTool an Open Source project opening it up for others to work on. MapTool has always and will always be free and open for anyone to contribute.
After version 1.2 was released. Giliath’s group had all the features they were immediately interested in, so he and Mr. Ice began a slow fade from the contributor’s list. About that same time the community was gaining some great momentum, so the new feature requests from the community started driving the tool. It’s been that way ever since.
During 1.3 development, MapTool took great strides forward in RPG frameworks, light/sight, and expanded MTScript capabilities. Trevor was the primary coder and Dorpond drove functionality from an end-user perspective. However, the end of 1.3 saw the fade of both Dorpond and Trevor.
After MapTool 1.3, Azhrei and Craig took over with some new faces coming to the fore to fill the gap left by Trevor and Dorpond. Today Azhrei heads the project functioning as project manager. Craig, the father of modern frameworks, works behind the scenes architecting MapTool v 1.5 and 2.0. Phergus and RPTroll continue to drive current and future functionality for the end-users. Jamz, Jagged, kayila are the major code contributors. Other contributors supply code, frameworks, art, and suggestions that keep the project vibrant and lively.
Over RPTools lifetime the core contributors had one thing in common: a love of gaming and a desire to give to the RPG community.
Special Thanks To
JIDE – For the use of their Swing components