D&D 5E dndcombat.com retired, will stay down

[Greggy C]

I want to leave one searchable post out there. dndcombat was a 5e combat simulator using AI to run combats between uploaded players and chosen monsters.
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I feel it was successful, we had almost half a million battles submitted by over 100,000 members of the D&D community. But it is expensive to run, it costs me $8000/year or more due to the number of users and large amount CPU required to run the full blown measured grid AI combat, with calculated spells/AOE over 100 battles in five or six seconds.

Also I haven't worked on it for around 6 months, my other projects have taken over and I don't see myself coming back to 5e. If I were to do it again it would be for a 6e version sometime far off in the future after 5e is fully retired.

For those that asked, the code is not going to be in the public domain, I don't think there are many java developers left anyway

All the best

Greg

 

[J.Quondam]

That's unfortunate. It was clear you put a lot of effort and love into it.* I didn't use it a whole lot, but when I did, it was quite useful in evaluating encounters.
Good luck in whatever projects you've got in store!


* And I say that an an ex-java dev.

 

[JEB]

A very cool site, shame to see it go.

 

[FrogReaver]

That's sad.

 

[FrogReaver]

One might could crowd fund the hosting cost just for running the current version.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Why not WotC to pay for that software for their own playtesting?

 

[DnDCombatEnjoyer]

Quite possibly some of the saddest news. Could I ask you to reconsider into making the code public? Or at least some "dumbed-down" version that could possibly work offline? Thanks in advance and thank you for the tool in any case.

 

[Li Shenron]

I tried it long ago and though it was great, but I had no idea it was expensive to keep.

 

[jgsugden]

I was not a user, but I hate to see good tools go to fallow. Out of curiosity, if you could crowdsource funds to continue running it, would you be interested in doing so?

 

[dave2008]

I was not a user, but I hate to see good tools go to fallow. Out of curiosity, if you could crowdsource funds to continue running it, would you be interested in doing so?

I will second this: @Greggy C, would you consider a kickstarter or similar? Seems fairly simple:

Project Goal: $10,000 - 1 year of DnD Combat
Stretch Goal: $20,000 - 2 years of DnD Combat
Stretch Goal: $40,000 - 3 years of DnD Combat + update to 2024 rules
Stretch Goal: $50,000 - an additional year of DnD Combat,
etc.

There, your Kickstarter is ready to go!