At least on the old builder you could customize the text blurbs. No such luck with the new one. I actually rather like the Feats page they make available using the new character sheet layout--it's a lot easier to read--but some of the canned short descriptions are pretty useless.
The CB is still crappy
- Thread starter Dannyalcatraz
- Start date
I know, but I really don't need everything computerized for me by someone else. My past 4 PCs in 3.5 and 4Ed all reside primarily in the "Notes" of a Palm E2 and my iTouch. Just typed 'em in.
I ran into issues yesterday and finally noticed how sluggish it was. I had to dig out my lvl 11 paladin for a game, and couldn't find his sheets, so i grabbed a save from the old CB and imported it. yeah, big mistake. Was causing it to throw errors left and right, could get rid of items in inventory. I know the problem resolves around the lack of schema and such for validation in the old CB. I ended up ditching and rebuilding the character from scratch. No problems there. They should have just scrapped the import feature since there was no way to reliably validate input.
Building to lvl 11, was agonizingly slow. I build these web services based backends and interfaces for a living. This is just pathetic. Trying to filter feats to get select the one I want is agonizing. I don't know if it's a case of needing indices on the feat table's name fields or piss poor webservice design, but it's just not responsive like i know it can be.
Building to lvl 11, was agonizingly slow. I build these web services based backends and interfaces for a living. This is just pathetic. Trying to filter feats to get select the one I want is agonizing. I don't know if it's a case of needing indices on the feat table's name fields or piss poor webservice design, but it's just not responsive like i know it can be.
the Jester
Legend
Well, it wouldn't be if that was the only issue with the CB.
Given the level of total crapitude that DDI has been vomiting forth, I'm no longer willing to give them a pass on anything, personally- I paid them for month after month of basically no content, content-stripping "updates", etc. Come February, I was done, and now- two months later- there are some mild indications that things are looking up- but I am absolutely NOT going to say, "Oh, that little issue? Bah, wave it off" any more with DDI. I would be happy to do so if there weren't such huge disparities between the quality of DDI at release and now, but as things stand? Every little flaw adds insult to injury. Every flaw that wasn't in the offline tools is a slap in the face, because WotC basically said, "Okay paying customers, I know we gave you these awesome tools and lots of good content long enough to get you hooked- now pay us for a year of beta-testing!"
Naw, screw that. Hangups, glitches, the inability to house rule (STILL)- I could avoid all of those two years ago, at least moreso than I can now with the online CB. I'm done paying for it until DDI is where it was a year and a half ago.
Since we're about to start a Dark Sun campaign I finally gave the Online CB a test.
After installing Silverlight it crashed on me twice but after that it's been running okay.
It's a bit annoying that it doesn't allow filtering sources (or does it?); defining campaign rules was very convenient in the old Builder.
I was also a bit annoyed that it doesn't seem to support alternate point-buy systems. In the old builder a character was simply flagged house-ruled - in the new one you simply cannot continue before you 'correct' your attribute scores.
The biggest annoyance by far is printing character sheets: It takes forever and the results are hardly unusable: It's blurry as hell and it appears to have problems with A4 format:
information was cut from both sides of the sheets.
Unfortunately the copy to clipboard feature also seems to be gone.
So, my current verdict: Yep, it's still crappy - they absolutely must find a better way to print character sheets. What good is a builder if it cannot produce a usable character sheet?
As it is you can only use it for character planning, then it's back to filling out a sheet manually with your pencil.
After installing Silverlight it crashed on me twice but after that it's been running okay.
It's a bit annoying that it doesn't allow filtering sources (or does it?); defining campaign rules was very convenient in the old Builder.
I was also a bit annoyed that it doesn't seem to support alternate point-buy systems. In the old builder a character was simply flagged house-ruled - in the new one you simply cannot continue before you 'correct' your attribute scores.
The biggest annoyance by far is printing character sheets: It takes forever and the results are hardly unusable: It's blurry as hell and it appears to have problems with A4 format:
information was cut from both sides of the sheets.
Unfortunately the copy to clipboard feature also seems to be gone.
So, my current verdict: Yep, it's still crappy - they absolutely must find a better way to print character sheets. What good is a builder if it cannot produce a usable character sheet?
As it is you can only use it for character planning, then it's back to filling out a sheet manually with your pencil.
Dannager
First Post
In the sorting options drop-down menu, select Sources. Then expand or collapse sources as necessary to ensure that you're only viewing options from sources you are playing with.
I only checked the feats menu out, so this may not work identically when choosing equipment/powers/whatever.
Nonsense. It doesn't display the green "Next" button at the bottom, but you can skip ahead to the next step by using the step-by-step guide on the left-hand side of the Builder. Your "Assign Abilities" step will be marked with a house-rule icon (it looks like a house), and you'll be able to continue creating your character as normal.
I don't have A4 paper, so I couldn't test this with actual printing, but I did print in A4 format to a PDF writer which should carry the same output as a real print job. Information was cut off of the right-hand side of the second and third pages (the two miscellaneous info pages) but the others were fine. It was not blurry at all. I've heard about cut off sides with the A4 format, but I haven't heard of blurriness before your post. Are you certain that the blurriness is not an issue with your printer?
Thanks, I'll give it a try.
Well, that would be nice. I 'thought' the next step was greyed out.
I was printing to pdf, too.
That's exactly what I'm talking about: Only the pages containining cards are printed correctly.
Could it be that printing resolution depends on the screen resolution? That might explain the blurriness, since I'm only using 1280x1024.
So, apparently most options I'm looking for are already in place - only well-hidden. But the printing issue is still a deal-breaker for me. I want readable, i.e. vector-based fonts, not some screen-grabbed image.
Ryujin
Legend
One work-around would be to tell your PDF printing programme that you want to print to 8.5"x11" (Letter) paper, then tell Acrobat to scale the print onto A4 paper, when actually printing.
Don't have your PDF printing programme "optimize for web" as this will use higher compression, losing detail. As you're likely only using the resulting document on your own computer, you can increase the DPI, to something more reasonable; say between 600 and 1200 DPI.
Don't have your PDF printing programme "optimize for web" as this will use higher compression, losing detail. As you're likely only using the resulting document on your own computer, you can increase the DPI, to something more reasonable; say between 600 and 1200 DPI.
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wedgeski
Adventurer
Yup you have to tell Acrobat to print to Letter otherwise it will chop stuff off on the right-hand side of the page. This is the kind of rough edge (ha) the CB could do without, but it is easy to work around.
Edit: And BTW I think the current online CB is most definitely *not* crappy.
Edit: And BTW I think the current online CB is most definitely *not* crappy.
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Ryujin
Legend
Yup you have to tell Acrobat to print to Letter otherwise it will chop stuff off on the right-hand side of the page. This is the kind of rough edge (ha) the CB could do without, but it is easy to work around.
Edit: And BTW I think the current online CB is most definitely *not* crappy.
Would you accept, "Far from complete, or even as functional as the offline CB" as a valid descriptor?
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