You down with OCB?

[Piratecat]

Regarding the character builder -- I just made a new PC at 11th level, and I have to say the process was flawless. There are still some decisions I don't care for, and an unacceptable lag caused by Silverlight, but it's a world better than it was. Since I was one of the big detractors earlier, I'll say it: for me, it's now acceptably fixed and even preferable to the old character builder. Good job, you guys.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In North America, accouring to statcounter.com's numbers, WinXP + Vista + Win7 + Mac OSX = 97.5% of web users; another .7% is Linux. Pre-XP Windows (and Windows Server) is pretty much noise; virtually all IE6 users are running XP (since it won't run on anything newer without some trickery -- Vista comes with IE7, and Win7 with IE8).

On the other hand, a decent number of gamers have jobs and IE6-locked machines at work (and while your boss doesn't want you to fuss with your character @work, WotC is all for it). Having said that, especially after IE9 goes final (which should be very soon), I'd recommend dropping IE6 support if anyone asked me.

Right. Honestly I don't think IE6 is the big factor here anyway, nor IE7, which is actually at this point less prevalent than 6.

The REAL big consideration for a development group is tooling, build process, and just overall development work process. If you're a MS shop, which WotC most certainly is, you REALLY do not want to propose retooling your dev process at the start of a major critical line of business application development cycle with an aggressive schedule. There's a reason programmers stick to their familiar tools like glue. MS Visual Studio (or any other modern IDE) is a VERY complicated piece of software, many times more complex than say Office. It ties into the rest of your shop's tooling in a 1000 different little ways. The development process is going to involve expertise in a lot of different tasks and rely on a very intimate knowledge of many different things for success. OCB isn't the worlds most complicated application, but it is complicated enough. It has to serve a very high load, is locked into working with other existing tools and resources and existing data formats, and is going to be utilizing probably 4-5 different languages that your developers have to be able to understand and use well.

So you stick with your tools and do what you know how to do. For good or ill they built a team that knows how to execute using MS technology. That decision was made a long time ago and unmaking it really isn't an option. I doubt there was even one hour of debate as to what front end technology to use. It was Silverlight or nothing. Switching would have been insane. Any senior tech lead that had even suggested it would have been out the door in an hour flat. That's just how it goes.

When the dust settles and there's time to go back and experiment with how to integrate other tools and technologies into their application stack, and a good strong business reason to do that, then they probably will. In the meantime they had an OCB to get out the door. They did it. Notice, it was still a rough job. If they'd have gone and done it in say HTML5/JS we'd be waiting another 6 months, and there'd not have been old CB updates either, because every man is on the job 24/7 death march style.

 

[Mr. Wilson]

Regarding the character builder -- I just made a new PC at 11th level, and I have to say the process was flawless. There are still some decisions I don't care for, and an unacceptable lag caused by Silverlight, but it's a world better than it was. Since I was one of the big detractors earlier, I'll say it: for me, it's now acceptably fixed and even preferable to the old character builder. Good job, you guys.

Can you manage your character from the online CB during game like you could with the off-line CB, i.e. tracking healing surges, hps, daily powers usage, etc?

I honestly haven't looked at the online CB since it first came out and it constantly crashed on me, despite being a subscriber because the off-line version was just better in every way at that time.

 

[drothgery]

Regarding the character builder -- I just made a new PC at 11th level, and I have to say the process was flawless. There are still some decisions I don't care for, and an unacceptable lag caused by Silverlight, but it's a world better than it was. Since I was one of the big detractors earlier, I'll say it: for me, it's now acceptably fixed and even preferable to the old character builder. Good job, you guys.

It's not lag caused by Silverlight (except the initial start-up); it's lag caused by a high number of round-trips to the server. That would be almost unavoidable in a pure HTML/js web app, but in a Silverlight app you could easily grab all the data you need in the initial download and pull all the logic to the client -- it would take longer to start, perhaps a lot longer, and would quite possibly be hackable into an offline-only version, but it's certainly not necessary for a Silverlight app to round trip to WotC's servers as much as the online character builder does.

 

[Mapache]

It's not lag caused by Silverlight (except the initial start-up); it's lag caused by a high number of round-trips to the server. That would be almost unavoidable in a pure HTML/js web app

Nonsense. You can preload and cache whatever you want in JS and do all your work client-side. If you structure a webapp like this correctly, there's no need for the user to wait on the network in real time.

 

[Plane Sailing]

It's not lag caused by Silverlight (except the initial start-up); it's lag caused by a high number of round-trips to the server. That would be almost unavoidable in a pure HTML/js web app,

Totally avoidable by using AJAX to round trip the important bits of data behind the scenes. To much 'AJAX' ends up as cludgy solutions where huge chunks of data are passed backwards and forwards, and additional rendering is required at the front end again too, but between intelligent cacheing and careful use of AJAX, there is no reason why an HTML/js app would see that kind of lag (unless the server(s) are not being kept up to spec for the usage, of course!)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Nonsense. You can preload and cache whatever you want in JS and do all your work client-side. If you structure a webapp like this correctly, there's no need for the user to wait on the network in real time.

It's not lag caused by Silverlight (except the initial start-up); it's lag caused by a high number of round-trips to the server. That would be almost unavoidable in a pure HTML/js web app, but in a Silverlight app you could easily grab all the data you need in the initial download and pull all the logic to the client -- it would take longer to start, perhaps a lot longer, and would quite possibly be hackable into an offline-only version, but it's certainly not necessary for a Silverlight app to round trip to WotC's servers as much as the online character builder does.

Yes, and then in either case every time you want to deploy a client to another device you have reproduce and maintain all the 'business' logic yet again so you end up with a C# version, an HTML5/JS version, an Objective C version, and potentially a Java version as well...

Yes, designing your client to be mostly a very dumb thin UI with most of the logic on the backend probably makes things somewhat slower in some cases, but it also means that in the long run your architecture is a lot more robust and you can at least potentially afford to support more different clients. It also has positive implications for other services. For instance it is a lot easier for something like a VTT to leverage a backend service that knows how to do most of the calculations related to characters for it.

Really sluggishness due to implementing logic in the back end and doing a fair number of round trips is not really related to delays in round-tripping either. It isn't going to take more than a couple hundred milliseconds to round trip a request to the server. The delay would be in back end processing time. Nominally it isn't any slower to do the processing there than on the front end. It is really a load issue. The key point being that can be solved by throwing enough infrastructure at it and setting it up properly. Something like OCB back end should be pretty simply to scale horizontally, you can just create more instances and load balance.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Just gotta say this: while most of what you guys are saying would make perfect sense to most of my group- 80% are programmers- its been mostly impenetrable to me. Then again, I'm a "turn it on & lets go" guy. The more work you make me do to make the product a comfy fit for me, the less happy I am.

 

[Zaran]

I like that I can now make a character without it crashing but I will not be happy until it does what the offline builder could. Specifically allow me to add free feats and powers. Until then I'll use the offline builder or someone elses program. Ironic that I know of more people who have gone to third party programs after the change to the online one then when they supported the downloadable one.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

I've been able to make the character builder work, relatively error-free, until tonight. Now, I can't get it to do anything, and the rare instance where it actually finishes loading, it will not get far without erroring out.

I know they said they load-tested this, but either everybody in the world is making a character tonight, or their load-testing wasn't very thorough (I bet I know which it is!).

Lack of features is one thing, but when the frelling thing isn't even reliably available, that's just unacceptable.