From Trevor's Stickied post, above
Today's D&D Insider update includes the usual bug and stability fixes, along with some useful new character sheet features, and includes Heroes of Shadow, starting off the plan to have major printed releases match up with their digital release. You can find a more detailed list of bugs addressed here.Character Builder
- Dragon 386 Content
- Dungeon 187 Content
- Heroes of Shadow Content
- Character Summary
- Ritual Book
- New Printing Subsystem
- Updated PH1 Fighter and Warlord to Weaponmaster and Marshal
Compendium
- Dragon 386 Content
- Dungeon 187 Content
- Heroes of Shadow Content
- Updated PH1 Fighter and Warlord to Weaponmaster and Marshal
Looking Ahead
Now that we have synched up our digital and paper releases, in May we will have the normal Dungeon and Dragon content update as well as the content from The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond. We also have some big changes coming to the inventory system of the Character Builder in a future update, and a substantial Monster Builder update that adds a number of new features and functionality. We'll keep you informed through forum posts and broadcasts when we have specific update details and dates.
Much more informative and a lot less image damaging for the product (which is already very much in the dirt for actual and real reasons).
So what happens here is they put everything on test servers, test it out, then put everything up live and test it out. People start checking it as they're posting up everything live and sometimes there are issues. They are still finishing up pushing everything live, but I put my update out there sometimes as soon as people are able to log in, just so there's no surprise. So it's not that it's down for maintenance, it's that new code is being pushed live and you may have experienced an issue because of that. Sorry for any confusion, but things should be all worked out shortly.
Im not sure exactly what you meant.
What happened to me was that i was trying the new update, it gave me several errors and when checking the error detail, it said the app was in maintainance.
As for the process you described, that is a mess and the completely wrong way of doing things; the correct way, as everyone in the professional world of web publishing does, is either put a web page/skeleton app explaining that the app is in maintainance (and test the real app with another url), or direct the outside requests to a backup server, while the main one is tested.
Testing on a live, suposedly stable setup its a big no-no, totally unprofessional.
I also like the ritual book page. The only thing that could improve my printing experience now would be the original 4E character sheet.
Glad we have the Character Summary Feature back and Clipboard !
New Arts is cool. Happy the sync went up as promised.
Thanks to all the guys at the Studio for the hard work ! Please pass on the words Steve & Trevor...
PS 1 Bug - The Executioner's Poisonned Dagger Power shows Weapons (Rapier) other than the expected Dagger.
PS 1 Bug - The Executioner's Poisonned Dagger Power shows Weapons (Rapier) other than the expected Dagger.
Have you thrown it in the bug threat at the top of the forum?
Thanks again!
The mage can pick from the new nethermancy and necromancy schools..but have no powers to choose from relating to ether of them. However it seems that the Wizard does have access to such powers..at least at wills anyway.
I mean we have the powers but no way to actually choose feywild guardian?
I applaud the timing but still no eladrin knight?
I mean we have the powers but no way to actually choose feywild guardian?
I was able to select it.
I applaud the timing but still no eladrin knight?
I mean we have the powers but no way to actually choose feywild guardian?
I was able to select it.
Oops, I was looking in the class features, not the powers.
my bad.
Blakey
If it's not that means they're over 10 issues behind in their updates, and 397 is the update that included all of the racial stats.
Please, please someone tell me that the inclusion of data from Dragon "386" is a typo, and that they meant Dragon 396.
If it's not that means they're over 10 issues behind in their updates, and 397 is the update that included all of the racial stats.
I was just going to comment the same thing.
@GamingGorman - they can choose the Necromancy/Nethermancy options but they don't appear as "Suggested" options. You'll need to choose the "additional options" checkbox and then sort by source or keyword to easily find the HoS powers. This is probably something that should be corrected so I'll make sure it's in the bugs thread.
EDIT - Oh and I almost forgot! Great job guys, this release went really well, thank you!
Please, please someone tell me that the inclusion of data from Dragon "386" is a typo, and that they meant Dragon 396.
If it's not that means they're over 10 issues behind in their updates, and 397 is the update that included all of the racial stats.
Yeah, I botched that somehow. I've updated the post to be Dragon 396, the broadcast will unfortunately remain incorrect. Sorry for that one all.
Positives: Ritual Page, fixing the printing difficulty, and same day digital release that matches "Heroes of Shadow"
Areas in need of improvement: Quality Control. Example: Unless I'm missing some feature in the CB, I cannot currently change my cantrips to reflect the new options in HoS for my general Wizard. According to the text in HoS, I should be able to do this, even though my wizard is not a necromancer mage. I find this very frustrating, and it lessens the 'magic' of getting same day digital access when you still cannot implement all of the new options onto your electronic character sheet.
If I am incorrect about this, please let me know and I'll happily eat crow (or Raven, in this case).
definately a step in the right direction, Thank You.
P.S. - please please can we have the ability score updates within the week? Minotaur is updated, but goliath isn't, etc.
~Teo
What is the new printing system? Is there any place to get a description of these bullet points?
The "new printing system" is a completely revamped way we use to output printable material. It supports different types of paper sizes, resizing the output accordingly, and it allows multicolumn and multipage text flow in a much better way than we used before.
So what happens here is they put everything on test servers, test it out, then put everything up live and test it out. People start checking it as they're posting up everything live and sometimes there are issues. They are still finishing up pushing everything live, but I put my update out there sometimes as soon as people are able to log in, just so there's no surprise. So it's not that it's down for maintenance, it's that new code is being pushed live and you may have experienced an issue because of that. Sorry for any confusion, but things should be all worked out shortly.
Hello Trevor,
Just as a suggestion from someone that works in the networking/server world, if you are experiencing isues while you are pushing code, you should look into purchasing a load balancer. This way, you can have multiple servers in a farm behind the load balancer which would allow you to remove a server, or servers, from the farm, update them at your leisure while traffic is being served by the servers that remain in the farm. Once the update on the out-of-farm servers is complete, just flip them. Put the new servers back into the farm, remove the old servers and update them at your leisure, then put them back into the server farm. Job done and no outage/issues from a customer perspective.
Only seeing one vampire skill at level 11, is that right?
I'd love to be able to tell you but the Compendium isn't complete for Essentials classes anymore.
So what happens here is they put everything on test servers, test it out, then put everything up live and test it out. People start checking it as they're posting up everything live and sometimes there are issues. They are still finishing up pushing everything live, but I put my update out there sometimes as soon as people are able to log in, just so there's no surprise. So it's not that it's down for maintenance, it's that new code is being pushed live and you may have experienced an issue because of that. Sorry for any confusion, but things should be all worked out shortly.
Hello Trevor,
Just as a suggestion from someone that works in the networking/server world, if you are experiencing isues while you are pushing code, you should look into purchasing a load balancer. This way, you can have multiple servers in a farm behind the load balancer which would allow you to remove a server, or servers, from the farm, update them at your leisure while traffic is being served by the servers that remain in the farm. Once the update on the out-of-farm servers is complete, just flip them. Put the new servers back into the farm, remove the old servers and update them at your leisure, then put them back into the server farm. Job done and no outage/issues from a customer perspective.
Exactly, that is indeed the best solution; it can take care also of mantainance warnings that may require a site wide mantainance.
Didnt remember that option on my previous message, duh
-if loading a character fails (like in this case, which is also not fixed either), nothing else will work, always resulting in an error message; it requires a reload of the app to make things work again.
What is the new printing system? Is there any place to get a description of these bullet points?
The "new printing system" is a completely revamped way we use to output printable material. It supports different types of paper sizes, resizing the output accordingly, and it allows multicolumn and multipage text flow in a much better way than we used before.
Did you fix the 300mb to 1gb print file problems, by implementing real PDF printing?
What is the new printing system? Is there any place to get a description of these bullet points?
The "new printing system" is a completely revamped way we use to output printable material. It supports different types of paper sizes, resizing the output accordingly, and it allows multicolumn and multipage text flow in a much better way than we used before.
Did you fix the 300mb to 1gb print file problems, by implementing real PDF printing?
Cross posting just for you lokiare:
And since we are talking about printing, that the size of the file sent to the printer wont be 300MB+ (a user reported a 1GB job).
The old CB had none of those problems.
This, however, has not, but did not affect me personally.
I just tested this. I printed just the first page and was told it was 31.5MB. When I printed all 6 pages I got 153MB. I don't have anything else to compare it to at the moment. Default print settings, full color. I'll also note that powers seem to be sorted by usage. I don't know if this is true for all characters, but the Thief I printed had all at-wills, then encounters, and finally items. I'm pretty sure they were not sorted like this when I printed 2 weeks ago for my game.
A supporting example: If I had to rely on the character sheet alone for information about the "Blood is Life" class ability, I would have missed this section which does appear in the compendium but not on the character sheet: "If you end a short rest with more healing surges than your usual number of healing surges for the day, you lose any healing surges beyond that number but regain all your hit points."
Are the abbreviated entries in the compendium by design? A more cynical person than myself may automatically assume that this is by design to sell books. However, I want to hear, if I may, a response from WotC on the subject before making a judgement.
With the new Vampire class I have noticed that some class abilities like "Night Crawler" do not have an entry in the compendium or appear in the class description in the compendium. If I want to know what they do, I have to rely on the very abbreviated description that appears on the character sheet. I mentioned this issue in the non-Character-Builder thread as well as it is really an issue for both the Character Builder and the Compendium.
A supporting example: If I had to rely on the character sheet alone for information about the "Blood is Life" class ability, I would have missed this section which does appear in the compendium but not on the character sheet: "If you end a short rest with more healing surges than your usual number of healing surges for the day, you lose any healing surges beyond that number but regain all your hit points."
Are the abbreviated entries in the compendium by design? A more cynical person than myself may automatically assume that this is by design to sell books. However, I want to hear, if I may, a response from WotC on the subject before making a judgement.
There are apparently other, older E-classes that are missing information too. It seems like some sort of bug (an overwrite problem or whatever) in the compendium; while I'm as cynical as anyone I am betting somebody managed to cause a conflict somewhere. They were jacking around the class names and such too (there's no longer a "Fighter" in the Compendium), maybe that had something to do with it.
With the new Vampire class I have noticed that some class abilities like "Night Crawler" do not have an entry in the compendium or appear in the class description in the compendium. If I want to know what they do, I have to rely on the very abbreviated description that appears on the character sheet. I mentioned this issue in the non-Character-Builder thread as well as it is really an issue for both the Character Builder and the Compendium.
A supporting example: If I had to rely on the character sheet alone for information about the "Blood is Life" class ability, I would have missed this section which does appear in the compendium but not on the character sheet: "If you end a short rest with more healing surges than your usual number of healing surges for the day, you lose any healing surges beyond that number but regain all your hit points."
Are the abbreviated entries in the compendium by design? A more cynical person than myself may automatically assume that this is by design to sell books. However, I want to hear, if I may, a response from WotC on the subject before making a judgement.
There are apparently other, older E-classes that are missing information too. It seems like some sort of bug (an overwrite problem or whatever) in the compendium; while I'm as cynical as anyone I am betting somebody managed to cause a conflict somewhere. They were jacking around the class names and such too (there's no longer a "Fighter" in the Compendium), maybe that had something to do with it.
I will poke.
Hey all. First off - sorry that some class information disappeared from the classes with the new format. It was a bad side effect of trying to clean up the class ability entries. We're working on getting that information back in and in an improved form that has the level information some class abilities were previously missing. It's likely that this won't get in until May's update, though if we get any other details or info, we'll bring it to you here.
Did you fix the 300mb to 1gb print file problems, by implementing real PDF printing?
The huge print spool files are an artifact of the platform (Silverlight), not the Character Builder. I will still recommend that anyone printing in full colour at decent print resolution should keep a minimum of 1.5GB of spare space on their system drive.
Did you fix the 300mb to 1gb print file problems, by implementing real PDF printing?
The huge print spool files are an artifact of the platform (Silverlight), not the Character Builder. I will still recommend that anyone printing in full colour at decent print resolution should keep a minimum of 1.5GB of spare space on their system drive.
This is an excuse. The 'default' print method is as you describe, but you can do a google search for silverlight and print to PDF and see that many coders have fixed the problem and published their code to be used for free to fix this problem. It'd take WotC five minutes to integrate it and a week to test it. So its basically down to lazyiness at this point...
This is an excuse. The 'default' print method is as you describe, but you can do a google search for silverlight and print to PDF and see that many coders have fixed the problem and published their code to be used for free to fix this problem. It'd take WotC five minutes to integrate it and a week to test it. So its basically down to lazyiness at this point...
Without knowing that code or WotC's code, I can't say one way or another how quickly, or if at all, such code could be integrated. And they may decide to avoid such code snippets anyway out of concern for licensing or other legal reasons.
This is an excuse. The 'default' print method is as you describe, but you can do a google search for silverlight and print to PDF and see that many coders have fixed the problem and published their code to be used for free to fix this problem. It'd take WotC five minutes to integrate it and a week to test it. So its basically down to lazyiness at this point...
Without knowing that code or WotC's code, I can't say one way or another how quickly, or if at all, such code could be integrated. And they may decide to avoid such code snippets anyway out of concern for licensing or other legal reasons.
Using code that is made publicly available over GNU should be completely safe legally. Not to mention it would be nigh on impossible to tell if they used the code as once its compiled its very difficult to un-compile and match to source code. The fact that it isn't just one code snippet, but pages and pages full of different ways to tackle this problem makes me think they are just being lazy or doing it intentionally. If they are doing it intentionally to stop piracy or whatever they are failing horribly...
Using code that is made publicly available over GNU should be completely safe legally. Not to mention it would be nigh on impossible to tell if they used the code as once its compiled its very difficult to un-compile and match to source code.
That is completely wrong.
Depending on the licence (being GPL the most used for open source projects), such use would require WotC to give access to the CB code (something they certainly wont want to do), per the licence conditions.
As for being impossible to detect, that is also wrong; there are both commercial and open source tools to detect such code, which have already been used by the FSF and other groups (namely Busybox which has already won countless cases of licence infractions, all resolved out of court).
Using code that is made publicly available over GNU should be completely safe legally. Not to mention it would be nigh on impossible to tell if they used the code as once its compiled its very difficult to un-compile and match to source code.
That is completely wrong.
Depending on the licence (being GPL the most used for open source projects), such use would require WotC to give access to the CB code (something they certainly wont want to do), per the licence conditions.
As for being impossible to detect, that is also wrong; there are both commercial and open source tools to detect such code, which have already been used by the FSF and other groups (namely Busybox which has already won countless cases of licence infractions, all resolved out of court).
GNU was an example. There are many completely legal alternatives. Not to mention they can just look at the code and see how it was done, then do it themselves a different way. When in doubt ask your lawyer, but there are many solutions out there. I don't believe for a second they can't figure out how to do it. That's just a cop out. If they can't they are just bad coders and should be canned. Its much more likely that they are intentionally choosing to do this. In this case it is a management problem and as many have said before me they really need to start firing management...
As to being able to detect the code. that is doubtful. At best they can say it has the same purpose and accomplishes the same thing which is not illegal. If you know how compilers work then you know that the code gets translated and the original is not saved. It also undergoes a very extensive optimization process that completely changes how the machine code is organized and used, so its very easy to get two different code samples that do generally the same thing and come up with nearly identical output in machine code. So at best they could say yes it could possibly came from the same source code, but it could just as well be completely different code that has the same purpose.
GNU was an example. There are many completely legal alternatives. Not to mention they can just look at the code and see how it was done, then do it themselves a different way. When in doubt ask your lawyer, but there are many solutions out there. I don't believe for a second they can't figure out how to do it. That's just a cop out. If they can't they are just bad coders and should be canned. Its much more likely that they are intentionally choosing to do this. In this case it is a management problem and as many have said before me they really need to start firing management...
I agree.
I was just pointing out that just lifting some code from the web without consideration of the license it is on just because its open source, as you suggested, makes the company liable to lawsuits; being open sourced is not a license to steal.
As to being able to detect the code. that is doubtful. At best they can say it has the same purpose and accomplishes the same thing which is not illegal. If you know how compilers work then you know that the code gets translated and the original is not saved. It also undergoes a very extensive optimization process that completely changes how the machine code is organized and used, so its very easy to get two different code samples that do generally the same thing and come up with nearly identical output in machine code. So at best they could say yes it could possibly came from the same source code, but it could just as well be completely different code that has the same purpose.
As a computer analist, im well aware how compilers work, and they are not obfuscation tools; those tools use databases of code from compilations with diferent options, and its possible to decompile a program as well, thus giving fairly acurate comparations.
GNU was an example. There are many completely legal alternatives. Not to mention they can just look at the code and see how it was done, then do it themselves a different way. When in doubt ask your lawyer, but there are many solutions out there. I don't believe for a second they can't figure out how to do it. That's just a cop out. If they can't they are just bad coders and should be canned. Its much more likely that they are intentionally choosing to do this. In this case it is a management problem and as many have said before me they really need to start firing management...
I agree.
I was just pointing out that just lifting some code from the web without consideration of the license it is on just because its open source, as you suggested, makes the company liable to lawsuits; being open sourced is not a license to steal.
As to being able to detect the code. that is doubtful. At best they can say it has the same purpose and accomplishes the same thing which is not illegal. If you know how compilers work then you know that the code gets translated and the original is not saved. It also undergoes a very extensive optimization process that completely changes how the machine code is organized and used, so its very easy to get two different code samples that do generally the same thing and come up with nearly identical output in machine code. So at best they could say yes it could possibly came from the same source code, but it could just as well be completely different code that has the same purpose.
As a computer analist, im well aware how compilers work, and they are not obfuscation tools; those tools use databases of code from compilations with diferent options, and its possible to decompile a program as well, thus giving fairly acurate comparations.
No actually you don't seem to know how it works. The number of optimizations as well as renaming functions to numbered names and all kinds of optimizations really does mean unless you have the intermediary files or you have the source code you will not be able to tell the difference between two pieces of code that are geared to do the same thing, but that are written differently. Try it yourself you might be surprised. Write two separate pieces of code that do the same thing and run them through these programs, even decompile it, but be sure and remove the .exe file from the debug directory and not give the programs access to the intermediary files or the source code. You'll find that they come out to be almost if not exactly the same. Decompilers only make the code readable it does not reverse the process. for instance if you have this source:
int LongCustomVariableName = 0;
for (int loopRepeatCount = 0; loopRepeatCount < 10; loopRepeatCount++)
{
LongCustomVariableName *= loopRepeatCount;
}
When you compile then decompile you might get this:
int64 generatedInt64_000001 = 0;
for (int16 generatedInt16_00001 = 0; generatedInt16_00001 < 10; generatedInt16_00001++)
{
generatedInt64_000001 *= generatedInt16_00001;
}
or:
int64 generatedInt64_000001 = 0;
int16 generatedLoopInt16 = 0;
do
{
generatedInt64_000001 *= generatedInt16_00001;
generatedLoopInt16++;
} while (generatedLoopInt16 < 10)
These are simple examples. A decompiler would have much more variability it would increase with the increase in the size of the code. Its similar when comparing machine code. There are no identifiers. At best you can say that there's a chance it could be the same source code, but there would be no way to tell if the programmers were wanting to make it do the same thing...
Did you fix the 300mb to 1gb print file problems, by implementing real PDF printing?
The huge print spool files are an artifact of the platform (Silverlight), not the Character Builder. I will still recommend that anyone printing in full colour at decent print resolution should keep a minimum of 1.5GB of spare space on their system drive.
I think you missed the previous post.
I just tested this. I printed just the first page and was told it was 31.5MB. When I printed all 6 pages I got 153MB.
They revamped the printing. It took them 1 months (almost made the last update), with everything else they where doing.