PCGen sellout

[Henry]

Let me clarify a little...

Why? Start fresh, don't use bad code thats full of a lot of proprietary and badly designed code and data storage/manipulation.

My statement presumes that the naysayers of the direction of PCGen have been following and contributing to the existing design process, and are happy with the direction the code is going in now. If they haven't been involved until now, then they really shouldn't be concerned about this deal to begin with, and should be following their own efforts, as you say.

How about we see some design and architecture documents for eTools and PCGen to prove that legitimate software development processes are being followed.

WotC has obviously seen enough to know they want CMP to handle the contract. CMP obviously has seen enough to know that the specific software fixes promised to WotC are accomplishable within 90 days. On CMP's site (can't recall exactly where right now) is a specific list of the issues that they will address. According to Mynex, several have been fixed within the past week. Both parties are confident the contract is able to be fulfilled.

ETools users should have gotten their money back, with an apology, from WotC. Fluid should have bailed on the software long before it got to the point it got, when it was apparent that WotC had no true goals that could and would be set in concrete.

Since neither of us nor most of the forum members were involved, neither of us have enough info to squarely place the blame of WotC's shoulders alone. Fluid may have as much financial culpability as WotC in the venture. All we have to go on is personal allegations and rumor, and most of it from individuals biased by the situation.

I'm sorry, but I've not seen 3 years of value out of that work. Luke's done far more with his RPM software.

No offense to Luke, but his situation is different.
1) RPM cannot run cross-platform, a situation that becomes more relevant as time goes on.
2) Luke charges for his time and effort, and has a financial stake in RPM, which the majority of the PCGen coders do not.
3) I have successfully used PCGen as a full-featured character generator, offering every character option imaginable, since December of 2000. A user base of about 5,000 others have had similar success. In what way has it not fulfilled its value?

I disagree. This "deal" doesn't address anything. It only allows TWO tools, one controlled by WotC and the other basically controlled by WotC, to use additional options that are not available to other tools like RPM or Twin Rose's software. Thats not "options, not restrictions", thats "restricted to only our tools" of which both are mishappened hammers being used to pound in wood screws.

I'll thank you to leave my hammers alone, please.

Twin Rose CS and RPM are fine programs. They also aren't cheap, and have upgrade costs associated down the road. They also cost me time and effort in entering the data I need to enter, since they do not carry a lot of d20 OGL content. This is why I do not use them, or actively support them. Their program designs do not fit my needs.

With respect to the licensing deal: My comments are specifically delivered toward users who assume that this license means that PCGen has somehow lost functionality, or "sold out." It has the same functionality it did prior to the announcement, and will not likely lose any. In fact, my "options" statement is referring to the fact that users now have the option for MORE functionality, not less. I've said it before, and I'll repeat, PCGen has lost nothing.

I am sorry if it concerns you that other d20 software makers were not included, but they have every right and opportunity to approach WotC with their own proposals. Code Monkey Publishing cannot very well cut deals for all publishers across the board - they can only speak for themselves, and they have. CMP negotiated a deal, and they offer WotC a service that WotC needs. They gain is not automatically other publishers' loss.

I sorry we don't agree here, but I've got nothing but concrete use from PCgen over the years, with minor bugs to show for it, same as every program I have ever used.

 

[Hollywood]

WotC has obviously seen enough to know they want CMP to handle the contract.

Given WotC's trackrecord, I highly doubt that they known enough or made enough effort to guarentee that the fixes could be done. And thats just assuming that we are talking about making changes to an existing code-base. If we are talking about starting from near scratch, then its even more important that proper software design is followed. And bids accepted from a variety of sources.

Since neither of us nor most of the forum members were involved, neither of us have enough info to squarely place the blame of WotC's shoulders alone. Fluid may have as much financial culpability as WotC in the venture.

Its very easy to blame WotC because eTools went through so many different hands and therefore had many different guises. The trail eTools took from the beginnings as MasterTools is a typical "trail of tears" that has produced numerous bad software titles throughout the years. Fluid may indeed have been culpable, but they could only follow the directions given to them by WotC.

1) RPM cannot run cross-platform

Neither can eTools.

a situation that becomes more relevant as time goes on.

But no, I disagree that its relevant. There are really only two platforms that consumers have, a) Windows or b) Mac. The majority are still Windows machines. Linux is no where yet ready where it has anywhere near the ability for the standard consumer to use and run it in a fashion they would a Mac or Windows machine. Not to mention, Linux typically lacks the support for drivers and devices that are almost always updated with Windows/Mac machines.

Nonetheless, Java is a bad choice for cross-platform anyways, unless you are EXTREMELY careful with it. Ask yourself how many Java based pieces of software you can buy at BestBuy, etc. None. There are very good reasons for it, and one is the Swing API. Now there are some alternatives out there that use the native window APIs that can cause an increase in performance.

2) Luke charges for his time and effort, and has a financial stake in RPM, which the majority of the PCGen coders do not.

Yes, Luke and others like TwinRose software do. And in neither case, free or paid-for, does it guarentee that you will have quality programmers let alone quality archtecture and design.

3) I have successfully used PCGen as a full-featured character generator, offering every character option imaginable, since December of 2000. A user base of about 5,000 others have had similar success. In what way has it not fulfilled its value?

You poled this so-called 5,000 user base and thats the answer from everyone of them? I doubt it. I wouldn't be surprised to see that there are at least 1/4 of those users who are no-longer using or never really used the software at all.

But bottom-line, as soon as you leave the exact SRD rules for D&D, PCGen is broken unless you wish to add code or .lst files yourself. Not easy for the general D&Der to do so, especially considering the state that the Java code of PCGen is in and the archaic .lst files.

Some other software do allow more customization to the general database of rules/templates/etc. ranging from simple manipulation of a form and its variable or up to scripting.

And to me, PCGen has zero value. It can't handle my house rules, few as they are, and can't handle a single one of my characters or the characters in that exist in the group I play with [and thats not even bringing in Forgottem Realms material since that is where we play].
Not to mention, on general principles, I wouldn't use PCGen after having looked at the code.

I am sorry if it concerns you that other d20 software makers were not included, but they have every right and opportunity to approach WotC with their own proposals. Code Monkey Publishing cannot very well cut deals for all publishers across the board - they can only speak for themselves, and they have.

Which way did it go? Did CMP approach WotC or did WotC approach CMP? Whose hand is feeding whose? I seem to remember that one of the guys from Twin Rose said they were in negotiations to be able to use some of the non-OGL material.

Nonetheless, WotC should have proceeded in a way to, as you said earlier, to allow users "Options, not restrictions.". They failed.

CMP negotiated a deal, and they offer WotC a service that WotC needs.

Who cares what WotC needs. Its the users of eTools that WotC needed to think about, not themselves. eTools is a mess, especially for the cost that was charged for the software, and it needs to be fixed. No, not a few lines of code changed here and there, but a total rehaul and a new piece of software (professionals with years of software design and development under their belts) that fulfills the shipping goals for eTools and that software should be provided as a "patch", i.e. all users who bought eTools are entitled to a new free copy.

Screw WotC needs. At this point, their needs are secondary to the needs of customers who already paid good money for a piss-poor product.

 

[herald]

The fact of the matter is simple. The codemonkeys said that they were up to it. And thier time is worth something. I admire anyone who steps up to the plate and delivers. And if they can take some profit by it, well they earned it. I'm sure that WOTC would have liked to taken alot of bids on this but again, I'm sure the Codemonkeys would have beaten that too.

As for complaints about taking away from open source, well you don't build a company and keep it together by giveing everything away for free. You have to charge for something, so you can pay the bills. Once the bills are paid, then you can find time to do the things that you want.

I haven't always like the way that the PCGEN peole have conducted themselves, but I know enough to cut them some slack for the next 90 days (+Q&A time).

 

[Knightcrawler]

Okay I'm speaking mainly on PCGen here. I am not a member of CMP so I know very little of what is going on with E-Tools. Here's What we have.

E-Tools - Commercial Product THat You Pay Money For

PCGen - OPen Source Program That Is Free

WotC IP Datasets - IP Datasets That Are Not OGC That Both E-Tool And PCGen Users Will Have To Pay For

OGC Datasets - Every Other Source Thats Out There Under THe OGL. If Its OGC Its Freely Used By Everyone.

Okay PCGen has always been free and will remain that way. While I don't like the fact that I'm going to have to pay for the WotC datasets anything that gets them back in PCGen is a good thing.

And as to a level playing field, please. E-Tools will be worked on by employees of CMP only which unless I'm wrong means 10 at the most. Now PCGen which uses OGC sources can be worked on by anyone. We have about 40 "Official" LST Monkeys that can work on various sources. These are the people with usually at least one source under their belts and lots of experience coding the datasets. Then we have a whole community of people that come in and work on various parts of projects. So just in manpower terms we have at the very least a 4 to 1 advatage.

 

[Luke]

Let me clarify a little...

I'm sorry, but I've not seen 3 years of value out of that work. Luke's done far more with his RPM software.

No offense to Luke, but his situation is different.
1) RPM cannot run cross-platform, a situation that becomes more relevant as time goes on.
2) Luke charges for his time and effort, and has a financial stake in RPM, which the majority of the PCGen coders do not.

Hey, Henry. Just need to clarify a few things. They may be common misconceptions.
RPM isn't cross-platform, but does benefit from immensely from the platform it has chosen. My research shows very heavily that supporting all Windows platforms covers the immensely dominant percentage of people. Not plagued by supporting the lowest-common-denominator, I give the best I can to the greatest number of people. That said,as my development platform evolves, I continuously take options that can very conceivably lead to a cross-platform RPM in the near future. I don't want to take backward steps - so no promises.

My program is shareware, but I do not charge for my time and effort. Buying components for development systems cost money, and RPM shareware registrations pay for the on-going development.
The time and effort that I spend, is out of love for 3rd Edition, ,and partly for the challenge. Doing a complete suite from CharGen, to Advcenture and CampaignGen to full in-game support - in a completely open and extension d20 fashion, is no mean feat. I enjoy working on it immensely.
I'm not about to try and prove what I've just said, but I can tell you that people flock with money to WotC, and almost everyone else has a day job. This was explained very frankly to me by somebody I won't name who tried for years to make a business out of RPG-related software. I proceeded with my commitment out of love for 3rd edition - not money. If I want to make money, I would be doing something very different with my available time.

Sure, its possible that RPM registrations could do more than pay for itself with current developments in the future. If that happens, I have some really nice pipe dream developments in mind - not a holiday in Barbados

Twin Rose CS and RPM are fine programs. They also aren't cheap, and have upgrade costs associated down the road.

Prices are subjective, and everyone I asked about a $24 price tag said that they were very happy. Where I live, its far less than the cost of a single RPG book. I actually had a couple try to convince me sell for $40 (one person very well known and close to the WotC inner circle), but decided that I had the best balance between trying to make RPM available to the largest audience, yet be able to sustain on-going development.

I definitely need to say something about "on-going upgrades down the road"!
You pay a one-time shareware registration for RPM that entitles you to a lifetime of free upgrades and support.
People who paid early for an RPM registration, have continued to recieve on-going benefits with new features - often unexpectedly, and always at no cost. I don't view the RPM RPG community as a source of money. I view them as supporters of a program that I try continuously to improve for them.

Latest offerings about to appear include advanced dungeon generation, and network voice capability (as part of an internet enabling effort - I want to solve the hard problems first). These could be very useful, but they're still a shadow of my full intent. I release them early because people may benefit now.
I don't charge for any supplemental downloads. I find what I can that is quality and free (like D20 modern), and make it available for free. A couple of guys have also just started a yahoo group for file sharing that should be good. I won't moderate there, because I'd like that to be a community - where I have no dominion.
If you find any RPM supplements that cost anything, it will be because of a charge by the copyright owners of the material.

The most likely scenario for a paid supplement in RPM will be if people request me to do an import for PCGen lst files, ,so you can import stuff you bought from CMP

Regards,

 

[jdavis]

Who cares what WotC needs. Its the users of eTools that WotC needed to think about, not themselves. eTools is a mess, especially for the cost that was charged for the software, and it needs to be fixed. No, not a few lines of code changed here and there, but a total rehaul and a new piece of software (professionals with years of software design and development under their belts) that fulfills the shipping goals for eTools and that software should be provided as a "patch", i.e. all users who bought eTools are entitled to a new free copy.

Screw WotC needs. At this point, their needs are secondary to the needs of customers who already paid good money for a piss-poor product.

I am trying to figure out just what your point is here, you don't seem to like PCGen,you don't seem to like Java, you don't seem to like e-tools, and you don't seem to like WOTC. All that is fine but what is the point you are getting at. They are not going to give out a completly new program for e-tools and they don't need to, e-tools performs all the funtions it is supposed to, it's just buggy as hell. Fix the bugs and get on with life. Yes the program is goofy and sometimes hard to work with but all of these programs have their flaws, it isn't a real good program but it does work, and it will work much better once the bugs are fixed. The basic point is that I got what I bought, I can toss it or use it, but it won't be the first or last thing that I bought that I wasn't 100% happy with, heck I don't know if I have ever been 100% happy with any purchase ever. Thank goodness somebody/anybody is actually going to try and fix it.

Java?.....................Who really cares, if you don't like Java and you don't like PCGen and you don't like E-tools then don't use any of these products. Can we at least give them the 90 days before we start calling them failures or loosers or sellouts. The only suggestion from you that I actually saw was that they prove they can do the work and that WOTC should give e-tools buyers a completly new program. Well they will prove if they can do the work or not in 90 days and WOTC is not going to create a completly new program and give it out for free, that is just not going to happen and everybody knows it, it isn't even in the same realm as anything logical. We are going to get a patch and future support for e-tools not a new e-tools, I know that and accept that and am happy I am getting that much out of this crappy situation. It's not like this is the only piece of crappy software out there that didn't live up to the hype. Heck Microsoft puts out crappy software everyday.

 

[Henry]

Hollywood:

I could keep debating you point for point, but that would still get us nowhere. While it's clear you are unhappy with the options as they are, I have to say that I am, and that most E-tools users will likely be as well. No support for a product they purchased is far worse than support from a company that has apparent qualifications to do so. Disparagement of WotC over poor choices by previous managers doesn't help anyone, least of all the user base.

I still don't see where this is a thorn to the users or developers of Character utility software. This is not some anti-competitive business deal; it's a license to let two programs get extra data support, that doesn't shut anyone else out from making their own deals, should they take initiative to do so.

I do have to ask for a favor, if you would: could you please provide a couple of examples of house rules that PCGen cannot handle? I honestly have never seen a character generation house rule anywhere that PCGen cannot currently handle, outside of extra ability scores or attributes, and in the near future even those will be taken into account. Also, PCgen has LST editors that should continue to improve, so anything that can be modeled with a formula of some sort is addable; the only things that aren't added are situational bonuses, which you don't necessarily want to see added to your base scores anyway.

Luke:

I appreciate your weighing in on this. Since it's been at least six months since I looked at either RPM or Twin Rose CS, I haven't been up on current status for RPM. I also appreciate the clarification on your lack of upgrade charge, since I couldn't find the definitive answer to that on your site this morning. Most softwares do not have free upgrades for their major version number changes, and I commend you for doing it, in an age where it's non-standard.

However, my statement about compensation still stands, if amended. Coders of PCGen outside of the CMP members receive no monetary compensation whatsoever for their code efforts, to my knowledge - I certainly understand that using effective API's, controls, and libraries for Windows programs costs money. But there is at least a materials compensation involved, by your statement. And the monetary compensation by CMP staff is fairly recent, to my understanding.

It is interesting though: I replied to this thread in response to Wanderer's concerns: that of a PCGen user who thinks the deal is detrimental to what he considered a good product; Hollywood, however, introduced me to a whole new consumer: one who simply doesn't like PCGen, and thinks this WotC/CMP deal is detrimental for the other 3rd party publishers!

Leave it to Luke, however, to make lemonade with it all.

 

[DMFTodd]

but I do not charge for my time and effort.

I'll just add a little to what Luke said: Those of us charging for RPG software are not making money for our time and effort. Yeah, I charge for DM's Familiar. If I were to figure out my return for time and effort though it would be a very depressing number. I'd do much better to stick with my regular programming clients (and my wife would be happier).

Those of us writing RPG software do it because we love it. That's it. There's no money to be made here near as I can tell.

If the folks at CPM actually think they are going to make a living selling datasets, I think they will be in for a rude suprise. I hope I'm wrong and they all become fabuously wealthy, but I'm doubting it.

 

[Duncan Haldane]

You poled this so-called 5,000 user base and thats the answer from everyone of them? I doubt it. I wouldn't be surprised to see that there are at least 1/4 of those users who are no-longer using or never really used the software at all.

check out http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=25576;
It lists the statistics of downloads for PCGen. You will see that in the last week the number of downloads have been somewhere around 8,000.

Since PCGen tries to put out a new release every week, and I'm sure that many people that use PCGen don't try every version, I', sure that the active user base is far higher than the number of downloads.

To be honest, I actually think that a weekly release schedule is too much. Sure, putting a new version of the data files up every week is fine, and addressing bugs quickly is important, but they haven't had an official production release since 4.0.0, which was quite some time ago now. I really think that they should try to go to fortnightly releases, where, say, Odd release are Alpha, so people who reported bugs can see if they were addressed, and some people could test new features, and Even releases being Beta, which only have bug fixes and additional data, with no new features. These even releases could then become Production versions if there are no show-stoppers.

Duncan

 

[Mynex]

And to me, PCGen has zero value. It can't handle my house rules, few as they are, and can't handle a single one of my characters or the characters in that exist in the group I play with [and thats not even bringing in Forgottem Realms material since that is where we play].
Not to mention, on general principles, I wouldn't use PCGen after having looked at the code.[/QB]

Really? Tell the house rules. I'll make the files myself.

[QB]
Who cares what WotC needs. Its the users of eTools that WotC needed to think about, not themselves. eTools is a mess, especially for the cost that was charged for the software, and it needs to be fixed. No, not a few lines of code changed here and there, but a total rehaul and a new piece of software (professionals with years of software design and development under their belts) that fulfills the shipping goals for eTools and that software should be provided as a "patch", i.e. all users who bought eTools are entitled to a new free copy.

Screw WotC needs. At this point, their needs are secondary to the needs of customers who already paid good money for a piss-poor product.

Hollywood,

I sense more than a bit of disgruntlement here, and you are entitled to it, as it is your opinion. However obliquely it is stated, my _opinion_ and my _perception_ here is that you are disparaging CMP's programing abilities.

I would respectfully ask that you please wait and see what happens with e-Tools before going off like this. Our programming staff has a LOT of experience in coding in a professional enviornment.

Not to mention, you are slamming the door on things before they even begin. relax, wait for the patch we are doing, then make a judgement call please.