Why's it so hard to create a character generator that rocks?

[Silveras]

I'm sorry to hear that! I hope you find one soon...

Thanks. It has been 19 months. I'm more than a little tired of the "looking" part, and would like to move on the "finding" part.

 

[barsoomcore]

Thanks. It has been 19 months. I'm more than a little tired of the "looking" part, and would like to move on the "finding" part.

Times are getting better, I think. Hang in there.

 

[barsoomcore]

It'll take months, maybe even a year or two - but the resulting pcgen I firnly believe will accomplish this.

Excellent. PCGen is blessed with a lot of talented and dedicated people. If you're committed to the long haul (and it's always a long haul if you want to do it right) then you can make it happen.

Testing. Lots and lots of testing. Write the tests, then design the feature. If a bug gets found, write a test to catch that bug next time, THEN fix the bug. Review code. Review EVERY FRICKIN LINE of code. Build daily. If the build breaks, do NOTHING until the build is fixed.

You know. I'm just rambling.

Here's one more thing, though. Keep posting here (and elsewhere) and being super-cool and listening to people and not being defensive and demonstrating committment to excellence. First off, it'll keep you from getting "tunnel vision" -- you'll have to keep defending your decisions against brand-new viewpoints. Second, you'll attract excellent people and really, all any project ever needs to succeed is lots of excellent people and not quite enough time.

Keep it up.

 

[Silveras]

Times are getting better, I think. Hang in there.

So I keep hearing. A little personal evidence would be nice

On the lighter side, you might be interested in my Excel-based character sheets. They apply stat modifiers, etc., in a "I trust you to know the rules" sort of way.

Currently, for skills, they allow you to enter the ranks you purchased. It applies constant synergies based on those, adds armor effects, size effects, has a place for (but does not auto-fill) race modifiers, has a similar manual-entry place for Feat modifiers, auto-applies stat modifiers, and modifies Jump for speed and Hide for size.

Level-wise, they are designed to track what class you took at each level 1-20, and accumulates the individual bonuses (BAB, Ref, Will, etc.) on one sheet. The totals are referenced by the other sheets where needed.

 

[barsoomcore]

Super cool. Where do I get them from?

 

[Silveras]

Super cool. Where do I get them from?

My game site

 

[micr0c0sm]

I beleive redblade3.5 is the way to go - the character gen is now open source, and handles the rules quite nicely. It is also clean and fast.

It certainly is a good place to start with his code and port it to ideas that you see fit (XML, web interface, etc..)

 

[WarRabbit]

barsoomcore,
I also have an excel spreadsheet based character sheet and the best one I've seen yet is found here:

http://home.san.rr.com/blackbart/


Email me at LordTenser@aol.com if you want to see mine, but the HeroForge one is pretty darn nice.

 

[frugal]

It is my opinion that an application development team that didn't try to code in all the restrictions and regulations around classes, feats, skills and so on would be able to do a better job of implementing the interface and producing a reliable product. Granted, a less powerful product compared to one that DID have all that (and did it reliably), but it would be a BETTER product.

This is the difference between what you want from a character generator and what the PCGen developers wnts from a character generator. You can not simply point at PCGen and complain that it does not do what you want, it never will, it was not designed for you.

PCGen is designed to be able to cope with the myriad of rules and regulations surrounding classes, feats etc. The designers have decided that a BETTER product can be created by making it more powerfull not less.

A case in point: PCGen is the only character generator I have seen that can cope with feats like "Greater weapon focus" without needing to have a special piece of code for "give the list of all weapons the character has weapon focus in" like redblade, or just bring up the list of all weapons like Rolepayingmaster does. It is this ability to provide the details of the rules that is what makes PCGen different and allows it to find it's own niche.

- Redblade is small and simple.

- Roleplayingmaster has character generation as only a small part of it

- various excel sheets will add up the numbers but will not check their validity.

- PCGen is large and slow, but ti also followsteh rules the most closely.

 

[frugal]

Testing. Lots and lots of testing. Write the tests, then design the feature. If a bug gets found, write a test to catch that bug next time, THEN fix the bug. Review code. Review EVERY FRICKIN LINE of code. Build daily. If the build breaks, do NOTHING until the build is fixed.

I started to do exactly this, I wrote over 100 unit tests forthe new code I added. I tried to get as many developers as I could to follow my example.

Now 6 months later I have a sore and bloody head from beating it against a brick wall and a lot of the tests fail because the developers do not even bother to run them, let alone fix the ones that they break.

What works in a commercial environment does not work in an Open Source environment. You can not force someone to write tests unless there is some penalty involved