Even whjen they switched, there was no indication at all that iPads (and as a result all tablets) would see the rapid market penetration that they have seen.
D&D 5E The shape of DDI for 5e
- Thread starter Kzach
- Start date
Even whjen they switched, there was no indication at all that iPads (and as a result all tablets) would see the rapid market penetration that they have seen.
Even if so, the first iPad sold in April. The switch to Silverlight would have been in motion for some months - so iPads were at best a few months old at the time decisions would have been made.
IronWolf
blank
Very true. Still, when choosing technology one should look for flexibility to be sure you don't paint yourself into a corner if possible.
Also, smart phones were already starting to make a presence at the gaming table for quick lookups and such. The first iPhone was released in 2007. Given the popularity of the phone I would have thought some thought towards the application's use on mobile devices would have been considered.
Again - I know this is super easy to look at in hindsight and point out all the flaws in a decision making process. Silverlight just seems an odd choice even given the likely timeframe they were making this decision.
Tallifer
Hero
For the total non-tech guys here, what's wrong with Silverlight? And use small words, pretty please.
I am not technical either, but it is obvious that the new Silverlight Character Builder is two or three times as slow as the old Character Builder, crashes easily and PDFs of the character sheets take up 20x the memory. Definitely a big step backwards.
Well it's my understanding that, at the time, Silverlight was already being touted as a dead technology. Version 5 wasn't even expected to come out and even though it did, Windows 8 has basically killed it, so the prediction was close enough to true to warrant caution on anyone who would invest big money in a long-term Silverlight project.
Everyone, that is, but WotC.
And now, moving forward, Silverlight might very well be viable for another five or so years, but it will be at the cost of developing for a dead technology that will rapidly fall behind the market leaders and standards. Since it's already behind on a lot of levels (like speed and stability), WotC have essentially painted themselves into a corner, knowing that the corner was coming in the near future.
Keldryn
Adventurer
Regarding Silverlight and why it was chosen...
The original Character Builder software was written using Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) API, which debuted as part of the .NET Framework 3.0. WPF is the successor to the venerable Windows Forms API and was built upon DirectX, allowing it to take full advantage of modern graphics hardware.
Silverlight was originally called WPF Everywhere (WPF/E) and was designed to be a cross-platform API which could implement a subset of WPF features across different devices.
WPF was the natural choice for developing what was primarily a desktop application for release in 2008. It can take advantage of modern graphics hardware, but it is also a much better platform for the developers. This can't be stressed enough. With a small development team, they need to work as efficiently as possible, and WPF has a lot of advantages there.
When the decision was made to cease development and maintenance on the desktop CB app and move to an online-only solution -- and there are compelling reasons to do so other than to stop people from pirating software -- Silverlight was an obvious path.
Silverlight isn't identical to WPF, but it's a pretty easy transition for a developer who is already experienced in working with WPF. As a software engineer with experience in building applications using the traditional web-based infrastructure (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP/ASP/etc) and with Silverlight and WPF, I can say that Silverlight is a much better experience for the developer. All of the programming can be done in a single language, and you don't have to deal with all of the cross-browser incompatibilities; in this sense, it's like developing for a video game console versus developing for the Windows platform.
Regarding HTML5...
HTML5 is only a specification (which hasn't technically been finalized and won't be for some time). It's not a development platform in the same sense. HTML5 itself doesn't give you all of the modern graphical niceties like interactive charts and such. It simply defines a standard "Canvas" element, the browser developers implement support for that element, and then a developer still needs to use Javascript libraries to actually draw the chart on the screen.
The benefit of HTML5 is that there are no run-time libraries required in order to make use of it; so long as your browser vendor has implemented the appropriate features in the browser, it should work. The downside is that developers still have to work with the mish-mash of technologies and languages which have come to define the web, and browser compatibility issues can be an absolute nightmare to iron out.
If WotC's development team did not have a great deal of "traditional" web app experience, then Silverlight was the most reasonable choice, as it leveraged their existing knowledge and experience with WPF. Plus, much of the code could be directly migrated over, especially if they were diligent about keeping presentational elements separate from program logic. Developing an "HTML5 Solution" would have required pretty much starting over from scratch, plus a steeper learning curve while the developers got familiar with different tools and paradigms.
So that's how "intelligent geeks" could see Silverlight as a solid option, even without getting into the relative newness of tablet devices that others have written about.
To answer the actual question in your original post, I think that the 5e DDI will likely start over from scratch with its tools. They've gotten a lot of flak for going with Silverlight and mobile devices have taken off much faster than expected, so a cross-platform solution is desirable. Also, the core design of 5e looks to be very different from 4e, so re-purposing the 4e tools would probably be more work than building new ones.
Thanks, but it somewhat goes to prove the point; that it was easier to use Silverlight, not necessarily better.
And although I reference HTML 5 now, I only do so because there are HTML 5 solutions being deployed all over the internet so it's gone from an emerging standard to an 'in progress' standard. Even if it wasn't viable back then, there were solutions other than Silverlight that could've been used and would've been of greater long-term benefit to both WotC and the D&D community.
Short-term thinking leads to long-term problems.
Keldryn
Adventurer
True, it was easier to use Silverlight. I didn't say that it was better to use Silverlight. I was just trying to explain why it was a more intelligent decision than a lot of people seem to give it credit for.
The character builder doesn't need anything that was added in the HTML5 specifications. It would have been quite viable to build it using the HTML 4 standards and the AJAX and jQuery libraries which have come to define the so-called "Web 2.0" applications. The fact that the W3C hasn't finalized the HTML5 standard is pretty meaningless in real-world terms; so long as the major browser vendors support the important features (which they have for a while), then that's all that really matters.
There's no question that building the DDI tools using an open, cross-platform solution would have been a better long-term investment (and a traditional web app, HTML5 or not, is really the only workable solution here).
Definitely. Corporations in general seem to really fall into this trap, as witnessed by the now-standard project staffing practices: Go on a hiring spree during the project ramp-up, push the team hard throughout production (often including crunch time), then lay off half of the team when the project winds down. Typically, a significant number also leave by the time the next production phase gets into full gear, due to burn-out. The end result of this is that there is little continuity from one project to the next, and much knowledge is lost.
So I see the decision to go with Silverlight mostly likely coming about as the best decision the dev team could make given the short-sighted limitations imposed by senior management.
It might have been the only way that they could achieve their goals given a limited budget and a tight deadline.
Unfortunately, the tech companies - particularly Apple - were painting you into a corner if you wanted to or not. Steve Jobs hating Adobe Flash destroyed the major alternative to Silverlight.
IronWolf
blank
I would have put Flash in the same boat as Silverlight from the get go. Another proprietary technology that may or may not play well with devices you would like to see your product on. People choosing the tech at the time would already know iOS didn't support flash and for mobile platforms that did the performance was less than optimal.
There is something to be said for writing your applications on open, standardized platforms. It tends to lead to greater flexibility in the long run.
