cbpye.net

Alright, WotC has finally released an open beta build of their character builder.  You can download it for yourself from this page here and give it a spin.

For the purposes of being extra-critical, I’ll be comparing the character builder against Sheepy’s Chargen. This is a low-end system, so performance differences will be evident.  What?  I’m visiting my parents for the weekend, this is all I have for the moment.

System: Windows XP SP2; Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73 Ghz); 512MB RAM. Old-school. You know, I’m kinda saddened that I just referred to a 1.73 Ghz system as “old-school.” Can someone with a 500 Mhz Pentium III see how this thing runs on Windows 2000?

One last note: I’m one of the last people you’d normally be willing to ask for an opinion about a computer program. I’m a horrible nit-picker and it’s most likely going to show up here. Furthermore, let us not forget that this is beta software. If my feedback here helps them to improve the program in any way, that’s great.

So, let’s get started! The Character Builder (referred to as CB from here on out) requires the latest .Net release. The CB requires a 55MB run-time environment. Hoo-boy, this is getting off to a great start.
OK, the installer is a 600KB download. Makes sense, since all the data is accessed remotely and all of the graphics should be a light-weight PNG file. Once everything is uncompressed we should be looking at a 2MB app, tops. Oh wait, that 600KB app is actually a downloader for a 16MB installer. The installer runs automatically upon completion of the download.

Dwarf Wizard - one sample portrait from the program.

Contents of the installation folder look like this: the app itself is an 11MB executable, there’s another app named CharTracker.exe wieghing in at just over 1MB, an 8MB data file (at least, I assume it’s a data file), several other small files and 538KB of sample characters. There’s also a meager selection sample portraits installed to “My Pictures\ddi\Character Portraits.” This is pretty large for a program that already requires a run-time library, especially considering that it only includes stuff for characters level 1-3. By the way, the character files made by this program tend to come in at under 70KB, and are apparently just XML files. Hopefully we’ll see some third party programs that will be able to load and edit these character files.

The title screen has an embedded Internet Explorer HTML widget. Hopefully Microsoft has gotten better at locking that thing down, but I’m still wary of any app that includes an IE control. Fortunately, that seems to be the only place such a thing is encountered.

The layout of the program is pretty intuitive. It’s laid out a lot like a web page, actually. You’ve got the title bar of the application, no menu bar is present, and then there’s a row of tabs across the top for the various stages of character creation. The left side of the app gives a brief overview of the character you are currently working on, but above that there appears to be some dead space around the app logo. The center of the screen is where all the selecting takes place and the right side houses a pane that details whatever it is that you have selected at the moment. The center-bottom is an area that keeps a running list (when needed) for things like skills, powers and gear.

Selecting a race and class is straightforward enough, but the method of selection annoys me to no end. It’s like this for all options, sadly. Double-clicking an option does not choose that option while advancing to the next group of options in the process. Double-clicking merely selects the option — you then have to manually click “Next” or click on the next tab at the top. This is really lame.

Next is the backgrounds section. Takes a second to load the list. I didn’t select anything here, it’s purely optional. After that is Ability Score generation, which is simple and fast. Nice.  Skill selection is simple enough, as is feat selection. Upon reaching feat selection, I was immediately presented with the option to replace Ritual Caster with Alchemist (which I did). After double-clicking my first-level feat, I waited a full second for the “Next” button to become available. Things like that worry me. It’s nice how the feat selector shows feats which are relevant to your race and class, while culling the feats that you are ineligible for from the list.

Power selection is almost identical to skill selection. Equipment, on the other hand, was rather strange. Upon selecting your starting gear (Adventurer’s Kit, etc.) gold is not deducted from your total. You could load up your character for free, really, without ever touching the 100gp that you start with. There is an option to enable “store mode,” however, and that allows characters to adjust the rates at which they buy and sell their items. Why this isn’t on by default (with an flag set during character creation that allows items to be bought and sold only at base value), I do not know.

The lantern and oil are missing from the adventurer’s kit (they should be included according to the PHB), and removing an item from your gear loadout requires you to select it, and then click a button above the item list. Is it that hard to program context menus into this thing? Is there a good reason why I cannot right-click an item and select “Remove/Sell?” Sloppy.

Then there are the rituals and alchemical formulae. It’s not unlike skills and powers. My only gripe about this bit is that Rituals and Formulae are not in their own collapsible subsections. It would also be nice if the displayed selection was limited to skills that the character has trained.

Finally, you fill in your character’s details. This includes things like Name, Age, Gender, Height, Weight, Deity, etc. You can select a randomly chosen name, but only once per character. The randomizer does not cycle through a list of random names until you come across one you like (at least it didn’t for my warforged artificer… I was Cutter no matter how many times I clicked that button). You have to manually type in your height and weight. It’d be nice if it were possible to randomize this based on the race selection, or if weight could be determined via a formula such as (X*Con)*(Y*STR)=Weight (where X and Y are equal to a number between 0.85 and 0.95). The list of Deities here is HUGE. I’d prefer it if Forgotten Realms and Scales of War specific deities are shown only if the character were flagged as being in such a campaign.

You can also select a portrait and fill out some character background and personality information, keep a running journal, level up and retrain your character.What looks really nice, though, is the restrictions panel. I only wish it worked in the beta. Apparently, we’ll eventually be able to say “Stuff from Dragon #364-#368 is not allowed, and I’m making up a few new houserules as well.” This I like.

Back over on the left, down at the bottom of the app, is a button for your Character sheet. It’s automatically filled in, can show power cards and is just plain nice. This is truly the best feature of this program, because this is what it all boils down to: a sheet with your character on it. After the initial, sluggish loading of the sheet it was quite manageable and proved to be very customizable.  I’m very dismayed that there’s no option for exporting to a PDF file, though.

I know that the computer that I’m using to test this app is not exactly what one would call a decent, modern computer. It does, however, run OpenOffice Calc just fine. More on that later; right now, we’re going to compare the CB to Sheepy’s chargen (requires Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and up).

• Cost : Sheepy’s chargen doesn’t require a D&DI subscription. It’s free to use, download and modify. It’s all javascript and ECMAscript. This brings us to point #2…
• Cross-Platform Compatibility : CB requires the .net runtime, and I haven’t seen any plans from WotC to release a port for Macs or Linux-based systems. I primarily run Linux at home, and I don’t even think WINE + Mono could run this app as it is now. A browser-based chargen will still be the standard for those of us who don’t run Windows.
• Completeness : Although Sheepy’s supports feats and powers up to level 10, CB is more feature-complete. You really can do more with the Character Builder, even though it is a very sluggish and clunky program. If you’re rolling up a character beyond level 3 though, use Sheepy’s for now.
• Performance : Sheepy’s wins here, without question. No downloaders or installers or bloated run-time environments, the entire thing loads quickly, there’s no lag spikes while selecting feats and/or features and I’m able to get a character made in a much shorter time frame. CB looks nicer and has a better layout, that’s a fact, but that damned method of selecting options is absolutely annoying.
• Features : CB has more features, easily; but the only real feature that sets it apart from Sheepy’s is the smooth automatically filled-out customizable landscape character sheet. The same sheet can be printed from a PDF file and filled out by hand, of course, using data and information that was generated much more quickly using Sheepy’s chargen.
• End Result : CB gives you a filled-out character sheet that you can customize to your heart’s desire. Sheepy’s gives you a plain sheet of text with most of the important stuff on it (Sheepy’s does not yet do ritual selection). I’d have to say that the CB wins here by a decent margin. However, if Sheepy’s ever advances to the point of Lord Licorice’s Dark Heresy chargen and fills out a fancy PDF for you I’ll give the advantage back to Sheepy’s on account of it being not untolerably slow as hell.

Now earlier I mentioned OpenOffice Calc… here’s why. This is a spreadsheet-based Mutants & Masterminds character builder, in OpenOffice format. On this same old, slow machine, while CB was still running in the background, it took OOo Calc about 15 seconds to load that spreadsheet (about the same amount of time it takes for the CB to load up). After that, I could move through it at a decent speed, select feats and skills and customize things without little laggy moments slowing me down. Sure, it’s not going to be as pretty as the CB, and “streamlined” is the very last word I’d use to describe character creation for Mutants & Masterminds, but what I want to know is what kind of programming genius does it take to produce a 20MB app requiring a 55MB run-time environment that can’t out-perform a fully-featured spreadsheet application, when the end result of both is functionally identical. Sheepy’s Chargen, the D&DI Character Builder and every spreadsheet-based character builder all ultimately do the same thing: they aid you in building a character and give you a character sheet. Shouldn’t a dedicated app, compiled to run natively on a Win32 platform, be at least the second best performer of the bunch?

The Character Builder will require a D&DI subscription once it is finished. If the only thing holding you back from subscribing was a decent character builder, I don’t think you’ll find that you got your money’s worth unless you have a dual-core CPU. Surely, most people nowadays will have a dual core CPU, but think about that for a moment… WotC is asking for $5-$8 monthly for a glorified spreadsheet app that can’t comfortably run on a computer that’s 5+ years old. Walls of text and conditional statements are apparently pushing the limits for this ol’ thing.

It’s just sloppy. Don’t get me wrong — it’s a good program that does what it sets out to do, and does it without crashing or causing things to needlessly explode — but I just can’t really get over how poorly the app performs compared to a free web-based offering (and probably some spreadsheet-based offerings, too). If you know of a decent web-based or spreadsheet-based 4E character builder, could you post a comment and give us all a heads-up?