4/19 DDI Update

Are the character sheet pages themselves still big image files?

That isn't something that is a result of the CB. That is a result of the way that Silverlight functions.

A lot of people have found success installing a pdf printer (Cutepdf is free, and seems to be a common suggestion) and then printing out the pdf.
 

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That isn't something that is a result of the CB. That is a result of the way that Silverlight functions.

A lot of people have found success installing a pdf printer (Cutepdf is free, and seems to be a common suggestion) and then printing out the pdf.

CutePDF turns my 5-6 page characters into 13-15 page characters, for no apparent reason!
 

While that's true, the PDFs generated via this method are 5-10MB in size, whereas the PDFs generated by using a PDF printer to generate a PDF from the old Character Builder were under 1MB in size. The upshot is that emailing character sheets around is a bit of a pain with the online CB as compared to the previous one.

Otherwise, I'm very happy with the updates. :)
 

The Ritual Book print is very sweet! Also, if you don't want to print up dozens of pages for your character, there's a new neat little character summary print for those of us who DM online.

This product is looking better and better.
 

There are also magic items "from" Heroes of Shadow in the book in the builder. So some extra content exclusive to Insiders for the moment anyway.
 

This thing is starting to look good. There are still some issues that I hope they resolve over the next few months:

1. The marketplace is currently the weakest part of the builder. It looks like they are going to overhaul it next month, and boy does it need it.

2. The ability to house rule.

3. Choice of portrait (uploaded) and the option for the original builder character sheet.

4. There are still some options located in non-intuitive places. Paragon path and epic destiny, for example, should appear in the class tab, not nestled near the bottom of the character details page.

5. The builder still has the annoying habit of selecting things for you (automatically selecting heroic effort instead of the bonus human at-will, automatically selecting lay on hands for paladins, automatically selecting the paragon path for essentials characters).

6. While it has gotten considerably better over time, the builder is still laggy/slow about acknowledging choices. You have to wait for about a half second, for example, for it to register that you increased an ability score while assigning points to to a new character, and sometimes a couple of seconds to register a feat choice. This slows down character creation noticeably compared with the old off-line builder. It is a minor issue but one that I hope they can continue to combat.
 

I don't know if it has anything to do with the update, but today, for the first time, the pages were loading up almost instantaneously for me!

Lets hope this has something to do with the update.
 

Yeah "an number of new features and functionality" sounds pretty awesome. :)

:(

I was very disappointed to discover that I've become cynical enough about the digital offerings that my first thought on seeing this was, "Oh, maybe now you can adjust a creature's Fort, Reflex and Will independently or add a skill or something."

I'm really, really, REALLY hoping that this means you'll be able to, you know, actually BUILD A GODDAMN MONSTER with the Monster Builder again. But until I hear it's there from current subscribers, I'm not counting on it.
 

I must say, I'm impressed as hell they actually pulled off the zero-day update for Heroes of Shadow. And for the Weaponmaster stuff!

-O
 

Man, I hope they fixed the various and sundry printing problems. The rest is icing on the cake IMO.

Happy to report that the printing problems are mostly fixed. PDFs are now the proper number of pages. Still far too large, but I can live with that.

A new problem. Printing directly from the Character Builder's "Character Sheet" allows you to print either Page 1 or the entire thing. If you select specific pages (at least in Windows), it sits there and does nothing - it doesn't even queue the document.

I solved this problem by making a PDF and printing from there, just like I did before the PDF problem cropped up.
 

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