You down with OCB?

[Abstruse]

I've used both now finally after getting a month of DDi just to see if it was worth the money. Honestly, I'm finding more use out of 3rd party tools and having a logon to the Compendium than I am with WotC's tools. And the online builder is completely worthless for me as a DM because I house-rule an additional feat at 1st level, which you flat out can't do in the online CB. Also, the adventure tools haven't changed since I last had an account over a year ago except a few extra monsters.

Enough generic whining about DDi's value, let's go with my specific problems with the online CB compared to the offline version:

- Slower. It takes just as much time to launch and load everything (if you can believe that). Sure, the offline builder took a good few minutes to load, but it generally ran fairly quickly once it did. Not so with online, it's slow across the board.

- Less functionality. I can't houserule to add feats/powers/etc., which as I said, I give a free feat to my players. It may be possible, but I can't find the feature to add custom items either and I love creating my own magic items to hand out.

- No custom portraits. Okay, this sounds like a lame complaint, but it's important to me. I love scouring the net for character portraits for my players to use to give them more attachment to their characters, but that's a wasted effort now because you HAVE to use the generic images on the CB.

- Interface feels weird. I like that you pick your class before your race now, because that makes more sense to me. But everything else feels like it's laid out in a weird way. Especially the "fluff" like name, age, etc. being required before almost anything else, which bothers me because I typically don't know what the character will be like personality-wise until I'm almost done making it. It just feels really weird the way things are laid out.

- Character sheets. This would probably be my biggest complaint...if I'd actually gotten finished making ANY character on the online CB. There's just one point every time I've tried - even with something as simple as a Knight - that I get frustrated and go back to the offline generator. So I can't say anything other than what I've seen on the current Encounters pre-gens, but I just don't like the way those were laid out. The actual sheets may be different from those, but I just can't bring myself like that layout no matter how hard I try...

 

[Holy Bovine]

Let my subscription lapse a month ago and still haven't heard anything that would make me want it back. If I ever hear of that load-after-every-click thing going away I might re-up for a month.

 

[Peraion Graufalke]

- Character sheets.
<snip>
So I can't say anything other than what I've seen on the current Encounters pre-gens, but I just don't like the way those were laid out. The actual sheets may be different from those, but I just can't bring myself like that layout no matter how hard I try...

There are two different character sheet styles available. None of them uses the old format, though.

 

[Viking Bastard]

Does the D&D Insider stuff use plugins like Flash or Silverlight; or is it pure HTML/JS goodness?

 

[GameOgre]

I have a question!

Do you guys think the DDI subscription would be worth it for someone on dial up? I'm unable to get ANY sort of broadband or DSL at my house. At work I can but at the house nada but Dial up.

So are there enough offline tools or things you can download on broadband and look at later when your offline/diaql up? I use a laptop as my D&D computer so at least i can carry it to broadband from time to time.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

Does the D&D Insider stuff use plugins like Flash or Silverlight; or is it pure HTML/JS goodness?

The character builder uses Silverlight (bleh).

Not sure what the Compendium uses to display content as an overlay, but it still works in separate tabs, so it can't be all that fancy.

 

[drothgery]

The character builder uses Silverlight (bleh).

The biggest architecture problem with online character builder [1] -- that it round-trips to the server far too often -- is not a property of Silverlight and in fact would almost certianly be worse in a pure web-based design. If you believe WotC when they say pure web-based design was not feasible, that leaves Silverlight or Flash -- and if you've done any programming, you know why Silverlight is preferable to Flash.

[1] Missing features are a design problem; bugs are an implementation problem.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

I have a question!

Do you guys think the DDI subscription would be worth it for someone on dial up? I'm unable to get ANY sort of broadband or DSL at my house. At work I can but at the house nada but Dial up.

So are there enough offline tools or things you can download on broadband and look at later when your offline/diaql up? I use a laptop as my D&D computer so at least i can carry it to broadband from time to time.

The Character Builder would take an excruciatingly long time to load, so if that's a major draw, then I would say, "not worth it," but the Compendium would probably work alright, considering.

If you can download the Dungeon and Dragon magazine pdfs on broadband, then it shouldn't be a problem. They are usually less than 1 MB, so even if you had to download it over 56k, it wouldn't be completely excruciating (provided you then save them for later use).

Adventure Tools still works offline, for the time being. Update when on broadband, or leave it on overnight.

VTT, if/when it sees release, will require a broadband connection to work.

 

[Viking Bastard]

Silverlight (although preferable to Flash) really puts a dent in it's appeal to me. I would've liked something that works with my iPhone or on an iPad.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Silverlight (although preferable to Flash) really puts a dent in it's appeal to me. I would've liked something that works with my iPhone or on an iPad.

Yeah, the problem is there are no good choices.

Silverlight is proprietary and only runs on Windows and Macs and only on desktop OSes. It is also unlikely Apple will ever allow it on their mobile devices (look how hard they fought to keep Flash off the iPhone and iPad). One day it MIGHT work on Linux based devices curtesy of Mono and Moonlight, but that could be years in the future and now that MS is gung-ho on pushing Windows Phone 7 they will do everything in their power to keep SL off Android. I wouldn't hold my breath there....

Flash is just plain ugly as the butt of a catoblepas. It does have the virtue of being supported on most every platform but writing complex apps in Flash is an evil nightmare. In any case creating a UI that would be serviceable on a desktop PC, an iPad type device, and a mobile phone for the CB seems like a big ugly hairy pig of a job in and of itself.

HTML5/JS in theory might be the best alternative, but it is only so in theory. In practice trying to build a complex app that ACTUALLY works reliably using these technologies on 8 different browsers is the biggest nightmare of all. Beyond that you have at least 25% or more of the people out there using old as death browsers like IE6 that simply cannot possibly handle that technology. On top of that there are really no good tools for building complex UIs using web technology that are of a high enough quality to build the CB with. I mean theoretically they sort of exist, but you'd have to hire a whole team of experts just to build that UI and it is a very expensive way to go.

The virtue of SL is that, bad a choice as it is, MS has very high quality UI design tools for it, and the people doing the development for WotC are obviously deeply embedded in the MS tool space already. Thus SL was by far the cheapest and fastest way for them to get anything out there, and in other respects no worse than anything else.

The real truth is that unless you are some huge shop like Google that has limitless funding and can throw 500 engineers at a problem building complex web based apps is a terrible thing to have to try to do. WotC is not just building a complicated application, they are doing it with tools that are on the far side of the bleeding edge of what is even possible and it will probably be MANY years before the situation is enough better that we will see ubiquitous support for things like online CB. It may well never happen.