Introducing WarFoundry
WarFoundry is a cross-platform, multi-game system, open-source army creation application. That's a lot of words, but what does it mean? Basically, WarFoundry is:
- An application to help build and create rosters or lists for your armies
- An application that should be flexible enough to work with any game system (including but not limited to Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, Warmachine, Confrontation and others)
- Compatible with all major operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, plus Solaris and BSD, as well as Android and iOS)
- Free to use ('free as in beer')
- Free to redistribute and modify ('free as in speech')
For more detail of what that means for WarFoundry compared to Army Builder (the main commerical army creation application) and Rollcall (the previous roster creation application that I maintained), please see our comparison page.
Getting WarFoundry - the downloads
WarFoundry is under continued development, but a first stable releases of v0.1 have been made for Windows (WinForms) and Linux (GTK) in November 2010 and April 2011 respectively. Please download v0.1 (code named "Cry Havoc") to create your armies in the new open and cross-platform format. There are not currently any development releases, as the bleeding edge version has not yet reached a suitable point.
Alternatively, if you want to get the very latest bleeding edge development code, then check out our Getting Started document.
Remember, whether you use the stable release or the development builds then WarFoundry is open source software and so you can use it freely and redistribute it to anyone you like, as long as you grant them the same privileges!
Helping out
Anyone can help out with WarFoundry, and you don't need to be a developer/programmer to get involved. We also need users, testers, translators, graphics improvements and documentation. Gamers from game systems other than Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 would also be hugely helpful so that we can identify things we're not handling in a sufficiently generic way. If you think you can help in any of these areas, please read our What We Need list on the development site.
Thanks to the WarFoundry team for their various inputs and interest in the project's further development.
Progress
Major progress updates are posted to our News page, with more frequent comments on the WarFoundry Twitter account. Alternatively, IBBoard's feed is available with more personalised development comments. A first version of the tool has now been released and an initial Linux version was in development, but active development is now on hold.
Legal
Please note that, because of threats of legal action over a trademark, WarFoundry's ability to help users create army rosters makes it an "army creator". The name "Army Builder" is a US registered trademark of Lone Wolf Development, who also claim coverage of any phrase using a combination of derivatives of those two words or their base words in relation to army list creation software. The only situation in which the phrase "Army Builder" may be used is as a direct reference to Lone Wolf Development's application. While we cannot prevent our community mis-using the Army Builder trademark in relation to WarFoundry's capabilities, we suggest that you do to avoid further legal action.