Projects, interests, and pontifications of Joby Walker
Failblog has a story from Dearborn, Michigan that made it to our local Fox Affiliate. Not only is the story hilarious but it is always amusing to watch NEWS anchors when they have to pause to recover their composure.
So I’ve made some initial progress on a D&D 4E character builder:
1) I’ve named it Mulciber after the forger aspect of Vulcan the Roman god of constructive and destructive fire.
2) I started with a pretty strict relational model but while that works for most cases it failed to handle some of the exceptions well and would require a bunch of tables with heavy keyed relations. Just didn’t work right.
3) So I’m switching to an XML document based model (which will have a simpler relational model DB behind it) that seems to work VERY well. This format allows me to encapsulate both data and workflow (choices and options) in the same object. Very nice….
4)I’ve created a fully fleshed out schema for powers that holds all of the appropriate data and can take into account other factors (such as character level or feats) that impact the some values. This flexibility means that a power like the dragonborn’s “Dragon Breath” that has 6 values that vary (ability that the attack roll & damage is based on, the value of the ability bonuses, energy type of the attack, the range of the attack, the number of dice rolled for damage, and the type of die rolled for damage) — thus very specific power cards can be generated with out all of the extra verbiage that is currently present.
5) I’ve started the XML descriptions of some other elements (class, race), but they need some refinement.
I’ll probably work on the XML documents and how they stack for a little bit more — so I get a very good understanding of the workflow. Then I’ll start making document builders (WebUI to enter data to create the documents) and the database backend to store the data.
Saw this one parked across the street at the church near my work:
The picture isn’t as good as I’d hope but you can get an impression of the license plate:
Captured on my way to work on Friday.
On my way home Thursday I almost caught another blue Prius, but I wasn’t willing to run in the heat to get close enough to capture the license plate so it doesn’t count:
Chloe doing what she does best:
Emma wondering what I am up to:
Hoth (neighbor cat) striking a pose:
And finally Basement Cat (Shadow, the other neighbor cat):
All of the pix of Shadow came out a bit blurry — must be one of Basement Cat’s powers.
I know Rainwytch doesn’t like her current living room set — so I found her a “new” love seat:
It’s waiting for you at 62nd and 15th Ave NE!
Gotcha. I noticed this one on a side street — of course after taking this picture I saw another traveling south on 15th.
I just got a call from the City that they are subpoenaing my testimony about the accident. After my two jury experiences, I’m not exactly thrilled since I’ll have to get up early to be downtown, be presentable for court, and will probably never get called to testify. At least I’ll have my iPhone to keep me entertained. Maybe I’ll transcode something to watch…
Wizard’s Randy Buehler posted an update on the D&DI product set yesterday. Although it is disheartening that none of the unreleased major products is ready for release, I want to thank Randy and Wizards for providing what seems like an honest assessment of the current situation. Leaving customers in the dark is the worst thing you can do, so regular, realistic updates are critical to not pissing off your potential customer base — particularly for a new product.
Let’s look at each element of D&DI:
1) Dragon and Dungeon magazines. These are up and running and I have been happy with the content and presentation. I really like the landscape page layout because it minimized column length and allows for better inclusion of sidebars, stat blocks, and resources. Good work Wizards!
2) The D&D Compendium. This has been a bit of a let down, but they are making improvements (posted by our favorite gnome) and soliciting feedback. But it looks like you still can’t search by keyword — such as “at-will”. [CORRECTION: You can! This makes the compendium much more useful.] Doing search right and satisfying everyone is hard as long as Wizards keeps improving the functionality, I won’t get too ranty.
3) The Bonus Tools. I suppose for “bonus items” I shouldn’t complain, but both the Encounter Builder and Ability Generator while having some limited usefulness are pretty clunky and not very friendly. If I had made them for myself I would be satisfied, but for a product for customers they need some more work.
4a) The Character Visualizer. I have never cared about the Visualizer. Creating a portrait of my character really isn’t important to me. I only have the vaguest impression of what my characters look like — it is the personality and effectiveness that I care about. Additionally since this is a Windows client application, I won’t be using it.
4b) The Character Generator. This is the application that I have been fairly excited about — to simplify my desire to find an build for optimal flavor and efficacy, and to simplify the process for those that I play with so that they don’t have to invest time into meticulously copying powers and computing bonuses. But the latest update dashed my hopes. I finally noticed that this is a Windows client application. WTF?!?! There is nothing about generating a character sheet and power cards that prevent this from being a web application. This also explains why this isn’t ready yet. Looks like I may be using what I learned creating spellbook to create a character generator of my own (for my personal, not public, use).
5) Dungeon Builder. It would be nice if this was also a web app, but since it isn’t I probably won’t be using it. Wizards believes that it is “mostly done” but since the Game Table (below) isn’t ready the primary use of the application is negated. Wizards should let people give this a try so that DMs can discover bugs now so they can be resolved before there is a crush of bug reports for the Game Table.
6) The Game Table. Another Windows client application that seems could be significantly more simple as a 2D web application. The minimum set of functionality for on-line playing of D&D is chat (voice chat would be great), a 2D map that players can interact with via their character and DM can add monsters, traps, etc. While 3D is neat-o, it is entirely unnecessary and is only add-on eye candy. But since this is a Windows client app, I doubt I’ll ever use it.
7) Pricing. Since none of the client applications are ready they’ll be staring with a “web-only” price of $4.95/month (with a 12 month commitment). This price is fair (for Dragon and Dungeon alone) and I will pony up the cash. I do hope that Wizards has thoroughly though out on-line payment — they don’t want a crush of people trying to subscribe only to fail because of some bug in the process. If after the client applications are available the web-only option is eliminated it is highly likely that I will be unwilling to pay $9.95/month (with a 12 month commitment) for D&DI — there is just too much that I won’t be able to use.
