Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MaxKaladin" data-source="post: 1449393" data-attributes="member: 1196">I've heard a lot of people say that it is Java and that is a possible reason the program is so slow.  Then again, there are fast Java Apps out there, so that may not be it.  I don't have enough information to know.  I understand this.  My sole problem with this could be expressed by saying I wish that having every possible race appear in the race selection window was an option that defaulted to OFF rather than ON.  That way I would get a list of the standard PC races and could click a button or check a box to see the whole extended list.  Or, at least, the standard races could be at the top of the list like the Jamis Buck generator does.  I just get frustrated trying to dig out human, elf, dwarf and so on from that huge list of possible races.  I was just looking at the filter option there, but was unable to find a filter that just gave me the PHB races.  Even so, the filter option struck me as powerful, but somewhat awkward.  Even if there was an option to filter by race, one would have to go through several extra steps to select it each time they used that program for the first time in a session -- open filter screen, find the right option/options and select them, apply filter.  That's three steps and it seems like it could be reduced to one or two for tasks that are probably quite common for a large number of users like this.  It could be done either through a hard coded option like I described above or some sort of saved custom filter buttons that can be set up by the user to allow for his own preferences at the click of a button.  Even setting a default filter that the user could then turn off would help.  Anything to make working through the program as easy as possible for users.  I'm a programmer but I work closely with my users and there is a general rule of thumb to go by:  The fewer steps the better.  Users just want to get from A to B as easily as possible.  Lots of powerful options are great if they don't interfere with easily accomplishing a typical task.  If you can give them powerful and versatile options then do it, but if they will only need them a small part of the time then make sure they don't have to use them the rest of the time.  Hmm, getting ready for todays game I think I can add that the class screen has the same problem, but at least has a "Type: Base" filter you can use to shorten the list to the stuff you need most of the time.  Now if I could just make that the default...I'm glad to hear it is at least on the list of things to implement.  I know it won't be easy since the structure of PCGen gives it so many options it has to take into account, but I think it will be a huge boon to GMs everywhere.  In fact, it seems to me that the Jamis Buck generator is a popular enough option for GMs that a good interim solution would be to simply add an import feature that can read the output from it even though it isn't up to date with the current standard for PCGen input files.  I suspect the problems one would encounter with the files generated by the JB Generator are common enough that they could be fairly easily identified by someone familiar with what the current incarnation of PCGen is expecting and dealt with in an import wizard.</blockquote>

Verification