CMP: On its way out?

[Mercule]

eek. This is where I admit to choosing a poor combination of words. It was an "I'm keeping you in mind" statement rather than an ability to send something now (unfortunately).

It's cool. I kinda figured that might be the case. It was a cool enough opportunity that I was going to make sure I passed my contact info on. Keep it or not.

 

[karianna]

For me speed is actually the main bugbear of the app -- though I keep hoping that one of these computer upgrade cycles (go core2duo!) will eventually render that moot.

since you're here I'd like to mention two things:

1) For some reason it really bogs down with high level characters for me. I make a wraith + Wiz3/Clr3/Mystic Theurge 5 and just selecting the classes to add caster levels to really bogs down. This is surprising because loading scads of data sources doesn't slow it down as much and I'd think that would require a lot more data mangling.

2) It'd be nice is PCGEN had some plain message boards of their own in addition to the mailing lists. For part-timers like me, message boards seem to work better. The yahoo archives are pretty hard to scan through and I'm already subscribed to too many mailing lists for sundry other purposes.

Thpr has already replied on 1), and boy are we glad to have him on board! . On the 2nd point, I/we have definitely been thinking very seriously about doing just that, as you may or may not know, my mandate is to turn PCGen into 'Semi Professional Open Source' and the final step of that will be to have a independent site run at say pcgen.org with the full message boards etc.

We've got the docs, the wiki, the Y! boards and the website hosted at Sourceforge, so we're pretty much there in terms of the content and community required to start such an independent site, we're now working on getting in enough regular donations/sponsorship to be able to host a site seperately . We'll keep you guys posted!

 

[karianna]

I've been waiting for RPGF for some time. I really haven't had any faith in its release for quite a while, though. Currently, I'm just hoping CMP sticks around long enough for at least one more update of PCGen.

On the other hand, PCGen is looking stronger all the time. If it speeds up quite a bit and some of the apparent memory leak/rendering issues disappear, I'll be happy. I'm pretty comfortable editing LST files by hand, but I sure wouldn't sneeze at a slick editor, either. My players will be happy if the GUI gets a bit of polish and there was a character sheet that looked pretty much exactly like HeroForge.

The UI will continue to receive some polish over the next few alpha and beta releases, but the majority of the work is going into splitting the UI from the core processing, that way we can overhaul the UI completely and even offer alternative UI's (AJAX, SWT, Swing, whatever). I have a list of the current improvements required, it's just a matter of finding a coder willing to do the work.

As for the HeroForge like character sheet, there is a request logged to do this, but in all honesty it won't be a priority for the team, we have a pretty large range of sheets that do seem to satisfy a vast majority of the user base, sorry to disappoint .

 

[Mercule]

As for the HeroForge like character sheet, there is a request logged to do this, but in all honesty it won't be a priority for the team, we have a pretty large range of sheets that do seem to satisfy a vast majority of the user base, sorry to disappoint .

I understand. I've tried to convert the HF sheet myself and it's a royal pain. Plus, I don't seem to be as proficient with the output tags as I am with the listfile tags.

As a GM, I'm interested mainly in power, with sufficient usability. However, my players are mainly interested in a pretty output. The other objection I've heard in trying to get them to move from HF to PCGen is that it's something of a pain to enter in higher level characters from scratch. I don't necessarily see it, but it's feedback, for what it's worth.

 

[iwarrior-poet]

And CMP has once again blown by its self-imposed info update on its web page. Yet another indication of a lack of commitment to their current/potential customers.

 

[Yair]

We're getting there, stay tuned.

The last time I tried to use PCGen, to create a level 13 multiclassed character, the program slowed down to a grinding halt and finally crashed so badly that it corrupted the character's file, leaving me with nothing after HOURS of work. My computer is pretty weak as it is (I was working on the low-memory version of the program), perhaps that's part of the issue. I left it, and won't come back until I'm assured this silly problem with high-level characters is resolved. Until then, it's just much more sensible for me to do things by hand.

 

[Henry]

To go back to the CMP issue at hand, as much love as I've had for Mynex, Merton_Monk, and the crew, I've got to say a project announced two years ago with very little to show for it is a hard strain on fans looking forward to something, especially since it's been undercut a lot by the loss of the official WotC support contract. I stopped following their site about four months ago, but if RPGFoundry hits with a big splash I would be tempted enough to return; the guys they've hired in the past have been some first-rate programmers and they tend to do some impressive work.

PCGen has always impressed me with the effort its fans have put in to keep it alive and relevant; my only problem of late with the site is that it's gotten VERY confusing to follow; the stable/unstable releases are getting kind of hard to track on the pcgen.sourceforge.net site, whereas before they were very easy to track. Dates, most current releases, etc. don't seem to match up like they used to. Heck, I'm not even sure what the Alpha release is up to, currently, just looking at the site! When the next stable comes along, I'll probably take a look, but I'm holding off and doing stuff by hand, currently.

 

[kingpaul]

The last time I tried to use PCGen

What version of the program was that?

 

[kingpaul]

PCGen has always impressed me with the effort its fans have put in to keep it alive and relevant; my only problem of late with the site is that it's gotten VERY confusing to follow; the stable/unstable releases are getting kind of hard to track on the pcgen.sourceforge.net site, whereas before they were very easy to track. Dates, most current releases, etc. don't seem to match up like they used to. Heck, I'm not even sure what the Alpha release is up to, currently, just looking at the site! When the next stable comes along, I'll probably take a look, but I'm holding off and doing stuff by hand, currently.

Could you be a bit more specific in your issues Henry?

 

[iwarrior-poet]

And now CMP's site is down again... Does anyone really doubt their days are numbered?