Digital Initiative Character Builder: Data Validation?

[Lizard]

Given that:
a)This was tried by WOTC with 3e and flopped utterly (just about every plan they've announced for DI was ALSO announced fro 3e, then half-implemented and dropped -- remember the character creator which came with the 3e PHB?)

b)Even eight years on, no third party electronic tool is 100% bug free and handles all 'core legal' characters with all possible options (PCGen and HeroLab are both good, but there's still lots of oddities and quirks).

I wouldn't get my hopes up. Granted, 4e is designed to be a lot simpler and internally consistent than 3e (which was simpler and more internally consistent than 2e, and so on), so this might mitigate the complexity somewhat. OTOH, that might mean a phenomenon of "We can't implement this cool class/race/power/whatever, it's too hard to add it to the character generator!"

 

[glass]

No, we don't.

I thought we did. Didn't they say there would be two different levels of validation (tournament and er, not tournament). Its difficult to have two levels of something you don't have.

We don't know how good it will be, but we do know there will be some (either that or my memory is playing tricks, which seems unlikely).

EDIT: Or, what Imban said.


glass.

 

[mattcolville]

Given that:
a)This was tried by WOTC with 3e and flopped utterly (just about every plan they've announced for DI was ALSO announced fro 3e, then half-implemented and dropped -- remember the character creator which came with the 3e PHB?)

b)Even eight years on, no third party electronic tool is 100% bug free and handles all 'core legal' characters with all possible options (PCGen and HeroLab are both good, but there's still lots of oddities and quirks).

I wouldn't get my hopes up. Granted, 4e is designed to be a lot simpler and internally consistent than 3e (which was simpler and more internally consistent than 2e, and so on), so this might mitigate the complexity somewhat. OTOH, that might mean a phenomenon of "We can't implement this cool class/race/power/whatever, it's too hard to add it to the character generator!"

They posted a lot of code and design jobs for the DI on Gamasutra, which they never did for 3E so there's reason to believe they've actually got something going.

 

[Lizard]

They posted a lot of code and design jobs for the DI on Gamasutra, which they never did for 3E so there's reason to believe they've actually got something going.

They might, at that. I assume these jobs were posted a while ago, since this isn't going to get coded between now and June. (That's the other thing which worries me...we haven't really heard much from people working on the project, and the clock is ticking. I hope there's tight coordination between the game developers and the tool developers, since there's still tweaks being made to the rules, and it's really easy to miss mirroring such changes to the code. Presumably, it's all data driven, so changing rules is just a matter of editing some XML files or the like.)