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CB's biggest failing by far: No custom content possible
- Thread starter DNH
- Start date
jimmifett said:
All of the reasons that I think any custom content will be a long ways coming. Back in the offline cb, the content could be stored locally and not shared with the official content, and it would not effect anyone else. I think this is a huge hurdle for WOTC and I do not see them implemting anything that will be passible to anyone but the people only using approved content.
The problem was that there was no XML Schema in the old CB. You could throw the data just about anywhere, and an xpath query could still find the nodes, without validating. An case study of what not to do with xml. With the online CB, the data is no longer stored in xml, it's stored in database tables. They use filters to transform the old CB files (badly) into table entries, and more filters to export new CB data into it's export files.
My mobile quoting does not seem to work....
Unless something has changed, the online cb includes the exact XML that the offline cb had. I looked at it very early on. The rules dll was kept on their side and they exposed all their content cached on the client side in an XML file, just like they did with the old one.
Go read the Wotc ddi forums about the discussions of people breaking down the program.
To me it seems badly designed. Now they may create the XML file from a db, I don't really know about that, but the basic structure how the cb uses the data was and probably still is the same.
Unless something has changed, the online cb includes the exact XML that the offline cb had. I looked at it very early on. The rules dll was kept on their side and they exposed all their content cached on the client side in an XML file, just like they did with the old one.
Go read the Wotc ddi forums about the discussions of people breaking down the program.
To me it seems badly designed. Now they may create the XML file from a db, I don't really know about that, but the basic structure how the cb uses the data was and probably still is the same.
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Looking at a dump I just made from the CB via fiddler.
It's still horridly designed xml, but it's cleaner than ever was from the old CB.
It looks like all the crunch and what not are being sent to client while to program is loading. for instance, changing a feat, it does not re-query the server for the list of feats. No wonder it takes forever to load up. Idiots.
During launch, setup some session based encryption, take the xml, encrypt it, take that, encapsulate in your message document, and send as needed. Significantly faster loading.
It then is storing any changes server side, and looks like retransmitting the entire character block back to the client. sigh.
Yeah, I wouldn't hold my breath for custom content, they can't even get webservices done right. I'll probably finish my CB first
It's still horridly designed xml, but it's cleaner than ever was from the old CB.
It looks like all the crunch and what not are being sent to client while to program is loading. for instance, changing a feat, it does not re-query the server for the list of feats. No wonder it takes forever to load up. Idiots.
During launch, setup some session based encryption, take the xml, encrypt it, take that, encapsulate in your message document, and send as needed. Significantly faster loading.
It then is storing any changes server side, and looks like retransmitting the entire character block back to the client. sigh.
Yeah, I wouldn't hold my breath for custom content, they can't even get webservices done right. I'll probably finish my CB first
On the contrary. I'm saying that they are more than likely waiting until they can implement a fuller suite of custom content options, one that won't be met with a general response of "You've had X months to work on this and all we get is this?? WTF??"
I believe, though I could be wrong, that they have stated that they are working on getting custom content support into the online CB. Though they haven't stated explicitly that they are looking to do a larger update on custom stuff at once, my guess is that they would. I fully agree that they should work on getting custom stuff into the CB, but it needs to be more than just supporting custom languages and religions because frankly, that kind of support really isn't needed. It might make the character sheet a tad prettier, but it doesn't really make it better per se.
I know! They should put some time into a learning how this stuff works.
I spent my limited spare time over several months (15+) mapping out a schema and populating an xml data set so I can create table structures. Powers are an absolute murder to do, I'm only at level 5 in just the cleric powers (after all the racial powers and class feature powers), but i'm fairly satisfied I can functionally describe any power in such a way to do accurate calculations. I've got the religions, all the various types of keywords, languages, (at least found in phb1), I've been working on monsters for my monster builder. It takes time, testing and planning. My MB has a pretty decent UI and uses xsl/xpath2 to generate picture perfect stat blocs, and I can run it through fop to generate pdfs on the fly.
eamon
Explorer
Except that it would be, oh, illegal to distribute? And that you'd be doing non-trivial work for free to support a for-profit company that could shut you down at a whim? This strikes you as being odd how exactly?
