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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EricLeaf" data-source="post: 463797" data-attributes="member: 6437">I believe the missing point was that for whatever reason this sale had been used by WotC as an excuse for cutting certain things and changing the goal of the project. But like much that the consumer hears, its all been filtered thru marketting, PR and spinsters. I was there at the beginning and there was never any question of doing anything related to an interactive game or online play (that which infogrames purchased the rights to), there was wishlist stuff for the future but for that sort of thing infogrames could be contacted and licenses settled.The heart of the problems with this project and many others at wotc was that Pokemon money dried up, thats why Hasbro sold those rights to begin with, and this obviously trickled down to a ton of other areas. Money has to be cut and I'm sure it was cut in many things regardless wether they were deemed potentially successful. This is buisness, albeit kneejerk buisness, but buisness none the less. Master Tools as it was then was completely cancelled shortly after Gencon of last year. Ryan Dancy resurrected it from the grave in January of this year with a vastly reduced budget and a reduced goals (mapper cut, etc...).In reply to your comment on disagreeing with using XML, since that was my choice and mostly my coding to get that to run, why do you think that wasn't a good choice? The XSLT transform offers tremendous power to the users to customize their output, as evidenced by the fact that the D&D character sheet and the statblock can both be made by the same XML output.And finallyThe other programmer on the etools project would bring those sort of topics up all the time. To me it seems to be a control issue only, that is a personal preference on controlling data or others with that data.These projects are "tools" after all and like any other tool improper use could be damaging. Do all screwdrivers have a warning not to stab yourself in the eye, or perhaps an eye-guard to prevent that? If they did, you would annoy more responsible people with it than lives saved, and this goes for software too. Any "open" product can reap a lot of benefit by opening its data at any level. From users that want something the developers hadn't accounted for, and want it enough to do it themselves. You see this in a wide range for eTools, new stylesheets, creatures and even UI art for inside eTools.The opposing view which you are supporting is only one of control, if the database is hidden then you and only you can update it, and potentially charge for it. I personally consider that weakness, I prefer code to stand on its merits not a hidden value that I am the only one who knows the formats.</blockquote>

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