Eh, at this point, 4e ought to just be an income stream to them. By no means saying they should give away the IP, but they shouldn't be worried about 4e rising from the dead in any way that doesn't just give them more money.
D&D 4E Get WotC 4e's Online Character Builder to work or get a sub
Eh, at this point, 4e ought to just be an income stream to them. By no means saying they should give away the IP, but they shouldn't be worried about 4e rising from the dead in any way that doesn't just give them more money.
Nemesis Destiny
Adventurer
That's good news! They care just enough to fix it.
I have to wonder what it costs them to maintain vs. how many subs they still have...
I have to wonder what it costs them to maintain vs. how many subs they still have...
I'm guessing unless they signed something crazy, costs are pretty low, even if there aren't a lot of subs involved. I mean honestly, at this point, the major worry is likely one of the computers fail, and maybe no one has the knowledge to get it back up again.
Nemesis Destiny
Adventurer
That would be sad times, indeed.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Well, running these sorts of 'legacy' apps can get to be a REAL PITA pretty quickly. It was probably all written to run on some specific version of Windows Server, one which is now FAR beyond its sell-by date. Any attempt to move stuff onto a newer platform runs into, at best, risks, and probably outright just "this isn't possible". The OLD OS OTOH is now completely insecure and has to be layered carefully behind some complex of application level and IP layer firewalls/proxies. All of this requires specific knowledge of how the application works, which means you have guys with 'job security' running it (IE they get paid a hefty premium over the average IT guys).
Now, DDI isn't THAT old yet, but these days tech moves fast. It is literally true that all the stuff used to implement it is DEAD tech. NOBODY uses that platform anymore. Today's applications are all 12 factor apps on top of PaaS like PCF or Mesosphere, all written in Spring Boot/Spring Cloud, etc. Of course, in 10 years that will all be dead tech too and just as hard to maintain...
Honestly, most of IT these days is a 'cargo cult' anyway. Few and far between are the guys that actually know squat. 99% of consultants just blather out the contents of the last book they read, and good developers can barely keep up with the rush to the latest fad, let alone get anything really implemented well.
Joshua Randall
Legend
Generally agree with [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] regarding the pains of maintaining legacy apps. Eventually those pains will become too great and the 4e tools will be turned off. 
Regarding CB, one of my abandoned projects was to take the character sheet output's XML and write a much better way to display the data. Has anyone done anything along these lines?
Regarding CB, one of my abandoned projects was to take the character sheet output's XML and write a much better way to display the data. Has anyone done anything along these lines?
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Generally agree with [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] regarding the pains of maintaining legacy apps. Eventually those pains will become too great and the 4e tools will be turned off.
Regarding CB, one of my abandoned projects was to take the character sheet output's XML and write a much better way to display the data. Has anyone done anything along these lines?
Well, I toyed with it a few times. I did grab the XML from both CB and compendium and subject it to some XSLT magic, but I really never got too far with that. It was time-consuming work and too much like what I do for a living, lol.
My feeling is that pulling it all into something like MongoDB would be an excellent approach. Its just a pretty big job and you still have to figure out what to do next after that... If I was WotC I might have thought of doing that sort of thing, but I'm not.
Amusingly I now live almost down the street from WotC, but I have yet to encounter any of those folks. hehe. I don't think they can afford to pay enough to get the top IT people in this market, and that's probably why they don't get much of anywhere. Seattle is a really tough place to hire such people.
Hi guys ,Like most of you l 've used the CB and the AB for years and now l'm having problems .Every time l try to use them l have to install silverlight ,l do this but then a message appears stating that lt is impossible because l alerady have this program.
Can you help me? thank you
Can you help me? thank you
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
That being too much like work has kept my follow through lowish
