Is the Online CB Working Well Now?

[drothgery]

I'm not American and yet it works fine. Perhaps you mean non- North American users?

AFAIK, the biggest localization issue is coming up in locales where the decimal separator is not a period and the thousands separator is not a comma.

As for the performance issues on poor internet connections -- well, I think that for a Silverlight app (or a Flash app or a Java applet), it's making way too many round trips back to the server. It's possible they could improve things considerably there at the cost of making the initial download larger.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

AFAIK, the biggest localization issue is coming up in locales where the decimal separator is not a period and the thousands separator is not a comma.

As for the performance issues on poor internet connections -- well, I think that for a Silverlight app (or a Flash app or a Java applet), it's making way too many round trips back to the server. It's possible they could improve things considerably there at the cost of making the initial download larger.

The initial download should not really be larger but more use would be made of a local cache.

 

[Squizzle]

If "add your material" means houserules and homebrewed stuff, none.
If "add your material" means adding stuff extracted from DDI / found online, that is the problem. As i said, using CBLoader alone is not the problem

I'm not sure why you keep bringing up things extracted from DDI, since to my (admittedly non-comprehensive) knowledge, no one has created a means of pulling Character Builder-formatted data from...I'm not sure where it'd be. The Compendium? The presumably otherwise-formatted Silverlight builder? This seems to be a major concern for you, so I'm genuinely curious.

 

[renau1g]

I believe there are some scrapping programs that can pull info from the Compendium. At least I think that's the term. I've heard people talking about it, but don't recall the specifics of the program. I believe that the HeroLab program makes use of one, but I can't be sure.

 

[Piratecat]

I'm no longer getting crashes, but the UI design of the CB makes me want to punch someone in the face. Character creation for me has gone from "this is fun!" to "this is so annoying I don't even want to finish this character." Boy, I'm disappointed by this, in part because I don't think my quibbles are going to change any time soon.

It's definitely worth trying now, though. Less buggy, and not everyone shares my complaints. It's worth checking out.

 

[Derulbaskul]

I'm no longer getting crashes, but the UI design of the CB makes me want to punch someone in the face. Character creation for me has gone from "this is fun!" to "this is so annoying I don't even want to finish this character." Boy, I'm disappointed by this, in part because I don't think my quibbles are going to change any time soon.

It's definitely worth trying now, though. Less buggy, and not everyone shares my complaints. It's worth checking out.

That's the way I feel... although my feelings when it comes to the post-MMIII Monster Builder are far more murderous.

PC, I recall that you were able to snag an interview with WotC's CEO some time ago. Considering the DDi issues (CB sucks, MB sucks, Dungeon and Dragon have minimal content) and the fact that WotC seems to have nobody prepared to address the issues officially (unlike what Matt Sprange did when Mongoose stuffed up), would you be prepared to ask for an official interview again to ask about DDi?

I admit I'm really browned off by the DDi issues I listed but a large part of that is because nobody responsible at WotC is prepared to actually acknowledge these issues and explain their side of the story (which, ideally, should include some guidance as to when things will be addressed, assuming that they will be addressed).

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I have a feeling that software project initiation meetings at WoTC gp something like this:

Senior Management: "We was application X"

Development Team: "Well that will take 12 months"

Snr. Mgt. "You got 6 months"

Dev. Team: "Impossible, because of...."

They comprimise on 9 months and the project actually takes 15 months and is still buggy.

 

[Mapache]

I'm no longer getting crashes, but the UI design of the CB makes me want to punch someone in the face. Character creation for me has gone from "this is fun!" to "this is so annoying I don't even want to finish this character." Boy, I'm disappointed by this, in part because I don't think my quibbles are going to change any time soon.

Agreed. The inability to browse things easily is terrible. I now find myself using the compendium to compare powers and such, and then only selecting them in the builder. The inventory browser in particular is a spectacular piece of crap. There's no global search, and you have to filter through a bunch of lists that basically require knowing the precise item you're looking for in order to be able to find it. The offline builder had a perfectly decent UI for this that let you select base items and enchantments, and it would nicely filter the other, plus it let you do a free-text search across the titles of all items of every type. And, furthermore, simply getting rid of stuff didn't require switching to another tab unintuitively filed with other tabs that correspond to different types of items. I couldn't screw up that part of the program worse if I was trying.