Unhappy about the VT Announcement.

[tenkar]

When I say "new generation of players" I meant people who don't currently play D&D and wouldn't have seen the survey in the first place. The VT is the only tool of the set that has the potential to bring in fresh blood. The next closest is the Character Builder which helps newbies build their characters. The rest all cater to people already playing D&D.

I think darkwing is on target here. Pretty much every post in this thread is "what's in it for me?" The VTT is probably NOT aimed at you if you are currently playing in a face to face group. It's aimed at those that want to play with their old college group that is scattered across the country.

More importantly, it is aimed at the lapsed players that bought the new Red Box and want to play with their old group which isn't a group anymore. Yes, there are other VTTs out there, but you would have to know about them to find them. WotC gets their VTT up and running, places a splash ad in the back of all it's books or each box, and people will suddenly KNOW about D&D's Virtual Table Top.

The other stuff won't be bringing in a steady stream of NEW monthly fees, it will just give stuff to those that probably already subscribe. The VTT can bring in NEW subscribers.

In all probability, if you are an ENWorld regular, it's not aimed at you. If you made it here, and you want to game regularly, you either have a face to face group or you found one of the current VTTs that suits your needs.

If you bought the Red Box, haven't gamed since 2e and your group is in the wind, then this VTT is aimed at you.

 

[Herremann the Wise]

For what it's worth, I truly hope that they can get a stable VT working regardless of the results of that survey. Such a product would more than likely see a strengthening in the hobby; an influx of new blood. While my confidence is down that WotC can deliver this in anything but a feature-poor shell-of-a-good-idea, I am here to hope that this time they can.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[AllisterH]

Ok, you commmented on the "popularity" of the DDI tools as being indicative in some way of their quality... my couterpoint was that when you don't have much of a choice... popularity does not necessarily, in any way, equate to quality.

Actually...there _WERE_ a couple of other char/monster builder floating around the web in the early days...

The problem is that many of them stopped updating since frankly, both CB-classic and MB were heads and shoulders above them.

Herolab for example sells their RPG creator for $30 but even with the fact that there was little customer support in CB-classic versus Herolab, I know of nobody that actually bothered with Herolab.

 

[Zaran]

I'm wondering if there will also be an announced campaign manager. Several of the missing features in the CB seem like they might be missing because they'd be better suited to a DM's toolbox.

IE the DM sets whether or not characters made in his campaign use inherent bonuses, or have access to house ruled items.

I think you are giving them too much credit. There really shouldn't be any reason why the characters should be linked to the campaign builder in such a way that free feats and inherent bonuses would be "imported" in from the campaign builder. No, I think the more believable explanation is that they had to rush through the CB and only had time to give us the bare minimum.

 

[Bagpuss]

For what it's worth, I truly hope that they can get a stable VT working regardless of the results of that survey.

To be honest so do I. I just wish it wasn't at the expense of other tools.

The new CB is a complete mess. It's pretty clear the existing Monster Builder has been abandoned. And they don't even have a timetable* for when they will add the Dark Sun Creature Catalog to the Compendium.

It's apparent they are trying to do too many things with too few resources.

*official response.

 

[Umbran]

Not quite. You can't write a generalized algorithm to do this for all potential pairs of programs and inputs. You CAN prove it for many specific programs.

Turing's halting problem can be sidestepped with a test specific to the algorithm being examined; Turing only showed no general algorithm can exist. Total correctness can be determined.

Total correctness for a given program can be determined for situations where the inputs are constrained (for example, if the input must be held in memory at the start of the run, and the machine has finite memory, so there's a finite number of inputs the code could be given). If you cannot constrain the inputs, you still have a problem, if I recall correctly.

I figure that's pedantic enough, though.

As a practical matter, this is not a useful result for general QA.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

As a practical matter, this is not a useful result for general QA.

Right, there is no actual practical useful piece of software that has been validated completely. There never will be. My first real job was developing the validation environment for flight software running on aircraft, missles, etc. Even THAT kind of stuff can't be fully validated, and you're talking about small amounts of code running on hardware with no OS or anything like that. Timing for instance is a huge issue. There are events that have to be handled RIGHT NOW or else, and that means code interrupting other code, etc. We could prove with stuff like that that any possible given set of inputs would at worst crash the software and it would recover within some small window of time. Of course you're talking about spending 8 or 10 million $ to ALMOST fully validate maybe 10k lines of code. Modern productivity apps along the lines of CB probably contain at least a couple 100k lines of code. It COULD be practically bug free. It would also cost $10k a copy.