E-Tools, A Programmers Prospective

[CRGreathouse]

I was hoping for a real GUI, and not a boring windows GUI.
But that didn't happen either.

This was in reponse to the public outcry aginst the 'cute' look & feel of the cGen that came with the PH.

 

[Simplicity]

I realize people use things other than ways that I do.
The Word add-in is definitely not going to be everybody's
bag.

I do wonder what benefit the E-tools interface provides
over a textbox scatchpad for stat-blocks if all you want to
do is cut and paste from E-tools and put it into another app.
Either way, it's pretty much the same.

As for the GUI. Oh, I know.... Damn you "Tools vs. Toys" group!
I should have made a "Toolbox vs. Pile of Tools" group.

 

[DMFTodd]

2) The stat blocks are not standard stat blocks.

There's a standard statblock for E:Tools available (both character and monster) on my site if it's any consolation. It's in the download section.

 

[Klintus Fang]

This was in reponse to the public outcry aginst the 'cute' look & feel of the cGen that came with the PH.

that is true. but they didn't come up with anything any better. It's amazing, but somehow they came up with a more "standard" windows look an feel (minus the skins) while simultaneously coming up with an interface that is less intuitive to use than the one that came with the PhB.

The "skinned" window look with glaring light text on black background as the default, with no easy way to change it, was a bad design choice, I think.

I realize it is possible to change it, but it takes hour upon hours to do so because you have to manually edit the config files while the program is off and then restart it to test your changes. Considering it takes Etools 5+ minutes to load the database when it starts up that means making any substantial changes to the gui colors takes such an obscenely long amount of time the feature might as well not be there.

Etools is though, on average considerable faster than PCGen. Etools is slow to start up and it is slow when loading the character skills tab but it's relatively fast for most other tasks. PCGen is slow every time you click on any tab or menu item whatsoever.

I'm actually starting to like PCGen otherwise. I just wish it wasn't Java based. It's too slow. I wonder if the PCGen developers would care if I took their code and converted it do C++ so it wouldn't be so slow.....

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Considering it takes Etools 5+ minutes to load the database when it starts up...

I've heard everal people complain about slow starts with E-Tools, but that's just outrageous! I have no such problems, myself, so I wonder what could be causing such a slowdown. My system isn't that great, a P III 900+ MgHZ, and for me it starts about as quickly as any major program, like Word or Excel.

As for interface, color me one of those who wanted this program to essentially be just like another program in MS office. Pretty graphics are nice, except for when I can't Alt-Tab easily out of the program. My need as a DM is for speed, and the interface seems plenty intuitive enough for me. It would be nice to resize the windows from time to time, but thats not a big issue for me.

 

[Klintus Fang]

eTools startup time...

I did exaggerate when I said 5+ minutes, so I just now decided to time it. On my PII 450MHz, this is what I get for average startup times:

eTools: 25 seconds.
MS Word: 5 seconds.
MS Excel: 3 seconds.
Campaign Cartographer 2: 2 seconds.
PCGen: 26 seconds.

So eTools doesn't take 5 minutes to start up, but it takes much, much longer than the typical program. PCGen is the only program I own that takes longer.

fwiw: I know why eTools is slow. It's loading the contents of that access database it comes with.

 

[Kesh]

Hrm. Maybe I should get to work on that Filemaker character generator I had planned out a while back.

 

[Davin]

Re: eTools startup time...

fwiw: I know why eTools is slow. It's loading the contents of that access database it comes with.

Some people find that E-Tools loads extremely slowly, others find that it's as fast as anything else. (I'm in the latter category.) It doesn't seem to have anything to do with CPU speed (within reason), but it is obviously varying from machine to machine. I'd guess that some configuration on your machine is causing this slowdown. For starters, try downloading the current versions of MDAC and Jet from MS's site (Wizards' site has the full addresses) and see if that might speed things up for you.

 

[Klintus Fang]

thanks for the tip, but it didn't help. I installed both those updates and eTools still takes about 25 seconds to load on my 450MHz, WinXP machine.

I've also scoured my system for unwanted background processes and haven't found any. In fact there seems to be no relationship between eTools slow load time and the number of processes I have running on the machine. Even if I get rid of all but the bare necessities, it still takes 25 seconds to load.

 

[Fast Learner]

My eTools loads much more quickly than that on a slow machine (PII 400MHz), so something's fishy.

Don't judge apps by what Office does, though: they cheat by preloading the bulk of all of the apps at startup (something called Office Startup).

I'm really stunned by your CC2 results, though: on my PIII 1GHz machine (with a screaming hard drive and a half-gig of RAM) it takes about 15-20 seconds to load, so maybe you're just lucky in other ways.