Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1564172" data-attributes="member: 812">You miss my point, Mynex. I'm not saying that having such features is bad in and of itself. I'm saying that the fact that PCGen includes such complex features goes a long way to explaining why other elements of the program like its interface, its reliability and its performance are so awful the thing is almost completely unusable.If the programmers had taken on a smaller task, and then worried about polishing the product, the usability would be so much better than it currently is it would hardly be recognizable.Of course, they didn't, because they're programmers and want to do the FUN stuff. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />I don't want the "perfect" character generator to fulfill every single person's needs/wants/desires. I want one that fulfills MY needs/wants/desires. Those are very, very different ideas.There is no 'perfect' tool for everyone in ANY field. Even hammers are customized for different users. But there are 'perfect' tools for specific user groups. You betcha.And that's how you end up with huge monsters that are never finished and never end up satisfying ANYONE's needs.Far better to pick ONE permutation, and do it right. Decide on some user group you want to satisfy and do everything you can to satisfy them, forgetting about everyone else. PCGen would be a fine tool if what you wanted was the ability to ignore your rulebooks and just create characters, develop them over time and be confident that they were perfectly in accordance with the rules. I say would be because it doesn't actually do that, but that seems to be the idea behind the product. Which I get as being a reasonably sensible goal. It just doesn't happen to describe my needs in any way.PCGen doesn't meet my needs. None of this is to dog on the PCGen team, who have in all honesty accomplished a very great deal. The thread is a discussion on character generators, and I posted my thoughts on what I would like. Nonsense. We who work on them have a different, and I submit better, path to follow. That is to design kick-ass tools and build them right. Determine a specific goal for your product and design it to do just that. Focus your design -- don't include customizability unless it serves the goal. Finding the right point of focus is really the critical job in software design -- once you've figured out exactly what the product is supposed to DO, building it is trivial. Most software projects fail because they never figure out what they're trying to do, not because what they're trying to do is too complicated.There's a variety of tools already on the market, because different developers have identified different focus points they want their products to address. Most of these tools are, like PCGen, pretty uncertain of what that point of focus actually is, and suffer because of it. As time goes on and the "RPG Software" market matures, these tools will more clearly identify what they're trying to do (or new tools, with better focus, will emerge) and I'll get my "Busy DM Char Gen" tool.Or I'll write it myself. I already wrote a "Busy GM Monster Stat Block Maker" (available (for Macintosh only) at <a href="http://www.widgetgallery.com/view.php?widget=35944" target="_blank">Konfabulator</a>), and am planning my "Busy GM Campaign Organizer" to follow. I'm sure hoping somebody ELSE will create a "Busy GM Char Gen" tool because if I have to do it, I'll be an old man by the time it gets done.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

Verification