Will the WOTC Gametable return or is it dead forever?

[Majoru Oakheart]

See I think part of the issue is we don't know why the delay happened in the first place.

Well, from what I know, the program was being coded by a 3rd party company. WOTC gave the 3d engine to this other company to modify as needed in order to create the Game Table.

In January(I believe) of last year, WOTC put up a job posting for programmers. There was some information to the effect that their main job would be to handle the transition between the 3rd party company and WOTC of the DDI applications. They would be primarily responsible for making post release patches. At least, that's the impression I got from the job posting and some information on the WOTC boards.

So, assuming they were hiring in advance of the transfer, they likely hired someone mid-late February. In late February, DDXP was on. I talked to the WOTC people there who were in charge of DDI. They were confident that the Game Table would be released in beta form a month before the release of 4e. They were accepting applications for Beta testers. I applied, excited to learn more about 4e earlier than the books came out. They were showing videos of the Game Table and demonstrations of it at scheduled times.

About a month before 4e came out, in May, I got an e-mail saying that although I was accepted as a beta tester, that the beta test was being delayed until the release date of 4e and the new Dungeon and Dragon Magazines that were starting in June. It said that the Compendium would come out first and would be available to everyone. After that the programs would roll out as they became available, but I'd be the first to know.

I never received any more updates after that.

After that, I got e-mail from GenCon saying that there would be demos running all weekend where WOTC employees would be running actual games using the Game Table.

When I got to GenCon in August, there were demos of the Character Builder and Visualizer but the Game Table was nowhere to be found. From talking to people at the show and reading blog posts of people's experience there, I found out that WOTC had decided the program was too buggy and that it crashed too often to actually run an entire game in it. They figured it was bad publicity to show it. Although, people who asked to see it were allowed to as long as there was a WOTC employee standing over them and waiting to restart the computer.

That's also where I heard the rumor about attempting to charge for 3d minis on DDI and the fact that the Game Table was not designed with that capability in mind. It was being designed to run games first. Afterwords, when they decided to integrate it with the rest of DDI(allowing you to search the compendium, attach a stat card to a mini, use 3d minis that you purchased, all only if you had a valid account and weren't running it in demo mode), they found that it was no easy task due to the way it had been coded(which was probably made worse by the fact that they were using in house programmers to modify the code that was created by the 3rd party company).

From everything I've heard, I would guess that the failure comes down to the fact that they hired a 3rd party company to do the coding with very little oversight. It is likely that they were shown demos of the program in action under carefully controlled situations where it looked like it was almost finished. They gave a deadline to the 3rd party company of May, the company said they could make it. And when they handed the program over, it crashed all the time and wasn't in a releasable state.

They gave it to their in house programmers expecting that they could fix the problems with it in a couple of months. They were not able to. They decided to put their effort into finishing the Character Builder and stopped working on the Game Table entirely. The Character Builder turned out harder to fix than they thought as well, and the finally got it done for January this year.

My best guess is that, after the Visualizer is done, probably in a couple of months, they'll start working on the Game Table again, and it might be done end of the year, or early next year.

 

[darjr]

Don't forget what else happened in July. I kringe bringing this back up, but this surely must have been building for a while and causing issues. It's missing from your history, I don't blame you for not having it, but I think it's important to include it. Maybe it's a small part in what went wrong.

My apologies if it comes off as crass or crude, that isn't my intent.

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[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I'd rather not. Your and justanobodies posts do seem eerily familiar. I'll take your word that your not justanobody.

No, they are not in any way similar. I've read to many sensible, reasonable and useful posts of El Mahdi (I guess, the majority of his posts?), which totally doesn't fit justanobodies profile.

 

[CharlesRyan]

I agree. Despite crossing swords with El Mahdi in recent conversations, he's no justanobody.

 

[wedgeski]

That's also where I heard the rumor about attempting to charge for 3d minis on DDI and the fact that the Game Table was not designed with that capability in mind. It was being designed to run games first. Afterwords, when they decided to integrate it with the rest of DDI(allowing you to search the compendium, attach a stat card to a mini, use 3d minis that you purchased, all only if you had a valid account and weren't running it in demo mode), they found that it was no easy task due to the way it had been coded(which was probably made worse by the fact that they were using in house programmers to modify the code that was created by the 3rd party company).

Well, I manage a software team that has been on the sharp end of situations like this, and what you just described, if correct, is a classic example of a poorly-specified application groaning under the weight of feature creep. Everything I've seen and heard (which is all third party) suggests that they simply didn't know what they wanted the game-table to do until much too late.

 

[tmatk]

...

That's also where I heard the rumor about attempting to charge for 3d minis on DDI and the fact that the Game Table was not designed with that capability in mind. It was being designed to run games first. Afterwords, when they decided to integrate it with the rest of DDI(allowing you to search the compendium, attach a stat card to a mini, use 3d minis that you purchased, all only if you had a valid account and weren't running it in demo mode), they found that it was no easy task due to the way it had been coded(which was probably made worse by the fact that they were using in house programmers to modify the code that was created by the 3rd party company).

...

Whoa, I've never heard anything about them charging for models. Is that true? I can't say I would be too interested in that.

 

[Sammael]

Whoa, I've never heard anything about them charging for models. Is that true? I can't say I would be too interested in that.

This was a plan at some point. Basically, if you subscribed to DDI, you would get 2D tokens to represent critters on the Game Table (your character would be represented by his 3D model), and if you wanted 3D models, you would have to buy them separately. Pricing was never discussed.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Whoa, I've never heard anything about them charging for models. Is that true? I can't say I would be too interested in that.

The last I heard is they were going to be charging for minis. They'd give you tokens to represent monsters and characters, but they'd just be circles with "A" or whatever written on them. If you wanted 3d minis or 3d terrain tiles, you'd have to pay extra. They kept changing their mind about how they were going to charge for them: Sets of them for a single price, individual pricing, random boosters, pay a single price for a mini and use as many copies of that one mini as you wanted were all mentioned. It was said that flat D&D minis tiles would be free but 3d objects(like braziers, altars, and the like) and 3d tiles would cost extra.

But the concept of charging for minis and tiles didn't seem to be part of their original design. I could be wrong about that, but there was way too much talk very late into the design about WOTC "Not knowing how the purchasing would work" for the minis. I could be wrong about that. But it seems that it would be one of the things you'd like to nail down so you could tell the programmers how to put it into the code. And, I wish I could find the blog where I read it last year, but I swear someone(maybe Critical-Hits, maybe somewhere else) said that they talked to one of the WOTC people at GenCon and they admitted that getting the DRM for which minis you had access to into the Game Table was holding things up because of the amount of code they had to rewrite to accommodate it. I REALLY wish I could find it. Mainly because I have the tendency to remember things that didn't happen and convince myself that they did. I certainly hope this isn't know of those times.

Even if I didn't read it somewhere, it seems like a valid theory.

 

[Sammael]

Unless the Game Table was horrendously hard-coded, I don't think that "getting the DRM for which minis you had access to into the Game Table was holding things up because of the amount of code they had to rewrite to accommodate it." was the reason.

For one, since the Game Table was supposed to be easily updated with new models and such (which must have been on the list of user requirements submitted to the developers), I'll make an assumption that all models were kept in a database somewhere (or at least linked from the database).

For simplification purposes, let's assume that the main DDI database has a table which stores all users (let's call it "User"). If all models are stored in a table called "Model," the only thing that needs to be done to limit models by user is to create an aggregate table called User_Model. Then, when each player loads up the Game Table, the only thing that needs to be done programatically is to run a query which would return all rows from User_Model for a given user. Even if all the models were hard-coded in the Game Table itself, the same principle would still work - running the query would tell the software which models to load.

 

[Tao]

The last I heard is they were going to be charging for minis. They'd give you tokens to represent monsters and characters, but they'd just be circles with "A" or whatever written on them. If you wanted 3d minis or 3d terrain tiles, you'd have to pay extra. They kept changing their mind about how they were going to charge for them: Sets of them for a single price, individual pricing, random boosters, pay a single price for a mini and use as many copies of that one mini as you wanted were all mentioned. It was said that flat D&D minis tiles would be free but 3d objects(like braziers, altars, and the like) and 3d tiles would cost extra.

But the concept of charging for minis and tiles didn't seem to be part of their original design. I could be wrong about that, but there was way too much talk very late into the design about WOTC "Not knowing how the purchasing would work" for the minis. I could be wrong about that. But it seems that it would be one of the things you'd like to nail down so you could tell the programmers how to put it into the code. And, I wish I could find the blog where I read it last year, but I swear someone(maybe Critical-Hits, maybe somewhere else) said that they talked to one of the WOTC people at GenCon and they admitted that getting the DRM for which minis you had access to into the Game Table was holding things up because of the amount of code they had to rewrite to accommodate it. I REALLY wish I could find it. Mainly because I have the tendency to remember things that didn't happen and convince myself that they did. I certainly hope this isn't know of those times.

Even if I didn't read it somewhere, it seems like a valid theory.

The idea of purchasing vminis was nixed a long while back, after there was a fairly substantial public outcry against it. I doubt that the DRM coding would really have been a holdup either, since they already do pretty much the exact same thing with Magic Online (which is also programmed in house). Basically, they were trying to handle distribution of virtual minis like they were already handling distribution of virtual cards, but were informed that D&D players are not Magic players.

Also, given that even the physical D&D miniatures sets are moving away from randomization, I think they got the point. Last I heard was that miniature use was just going to be a part of the cost of subscription.