Character Builder Lite

[kendo]

just wanted to add my voice to those expressing appreciation for all the work put into this planner. I have played DDO since beta and have way too many alts because I can't resist trying out new things. this planner makes creating and then keeping track of those ideas sooooo much easier.

THANK YOU !

[Behoram]

2.0!!! Great!! ty

[Bolo_Grubb]

thanks for 2.0 seems great.

I am however running into a possible bug. When I try to add the feat Dodge, the planner is only allowing me to place it is epic feat slots, not heroic.

[Kadrios]

I'm really enjoying using your program to work on my builds, and pleased to see all the updates you've just completed.

This may well have been asked before, but do you have any plans to extend the builder to include summaries of things like PRR, MRR, Spell Power, HP, SP, saves etc.?

[EllisDee37]

This may well have been asked before, but do you have any plans to extend the builder to include summaries of things like PRR, MRR, Spell Power, HP, SP, saves etc.?

No plans to add that, no.

It would take a ton of work to update all enhancements to include that info, plus it would require a fully functioning gear planner.

Not to say I'll never add it, just that currently I have no plans to.

[EllisDee37]

I am however running into a possible bug. When I try to add the feat Dodge, the planner is only allowing me to place it is epic feat slots, not heroic.

My guess is that you have 8 dex and a +5 tome, meaning you don't qualify until level 19.

An easy way to check and see what's going on is to slot dodge in your 21 feat, then drag the 18 feat onto dodge to make them switch places. Assuming Dodge shows an error state while slotted at 18, click on it to see an explanation of the error in the details box.

[Bolo_Grubb]

My guess is that you have 8 dex and a +5 tome, meaning you don't qualify until level 19.

An easy way to check and see what's going on is to slot dodge in your 21 feat, then drag the 18 feat onto dodge to make them switch places. Assuming Dodge shows an error state while slotted at 18, click on it to see an explanation of the error in the details box.

Good call that is exactly what is happening. Most of my character start with high dex, but the build I was playing with this time starts with 8 dex and I did not remember the dex requirement for dodge.

[LrdSlvrhnd]

A thought I just had, really only useful for wizards & artis... What about a note or toggle or something for rare spells? With my rogue/arti, I can recall double-checking the rare scroll list on wiki every time I leveled up (and constantly referring to it when planning out an arti for Cove)

[EllisDee37]

A thought I just had, really only useful for wizards & artis... What about a note or toggle or something for rare spells? With my rogue/arti, I can recall double-checking the rare scroll list on wiki every time I leveled up (and constantly referring to it when planning out an arti for Cove)

That's not a bad idea. I did include a link to both rare scrolls lists in the spells help screen, but it's probably worth including some kind of visual cue in the actual spells screen so that people can see at a glance what's rare and what's not.

I'll do some thinking about how to implement it; the listbox control doesn't let me change colors or fonts for individual list items. Maybe adding an asterisk (*) to truly rare scrolls, and a double-asterisk (**) to the ones only available in the portable hole.

[hit_fido]

Fantastic job on the new version, appreciate all the effort you've put into it for the benefit of the players.

[LrdSlvrhnd]

Great job on V2! A few things I've noticed while porting my characters from V1, though:

1) Enhancements don't always entirely transfer over. Only about 40-50 points are going through, requiring me to go back and figure out what went missing and add them back. Frequently, higher level enhancements transfer while lower-level ones don't.

2) Barbarian Ravager incorrectly has the T3 Aura of Fear requiring the T2 Fear Me! Since the latter only has one rank, you get errors trying to do the three-rank AoF.

3) The first spell at each level gets transferred as "1. Spell" "2. Spell" etc. (So on my bard, it's 1. Sonic Blast, 2. Blur, 3. Displacement, 4. Dimension Door, etc.) The *rest* of the spells are formatted correctly, just the first one at each level. And the "real" spell is still listed in the ones to pick from.

I've been doing "Export" with "Plain Text" and "All Sections" and "Copy to Clipboard from v1, then Import > Paste from Clipboard in V2, and (I believe) using the most recent build of V1; the other export options (including default) don't seem to work at all.

Edit: ...And just for the halibut, I tried opening the build from the original file, and it worked perfectly, so no idea why I've been doing this whole export-import thing, other than I would've sword it wasn't working when I started doing this last night... lol So you can probably ignore points 1) & 3), but 2) is still valid!

[EllisDee37]

Yep, reading through your numbered points I was thinking to myself "This sounds like he's importing builds instead of just opening them directly..." heh. Maintaining backward compatibility for build files is the highest priority. Despite the many structural changes to build files in the various releases, 2.0 can natively read any build files you've ever saved with any version, including the very first 0.9 preview version. This is true for all versions: 1.2 can read any older files, so can 1.1, etc...

Import is a tricky thing; it's designed primarily to import the standard output you see on the forums. I put effort into making it also work when importing the "Code Tags" version of output -- I don't generally use Code Tags for export but I quite like the way it looks -- but again, it's all based on the assumption that you're copying text from actual forum posts. I'm not surprised to hear that it doesn't import the plain text version properly. (Plain text is only there to make it easy to print; do a plain text export to notepad and let notepad print it.) It would be even less successful if you tried to import any export text that includes bbcodes.

Adding the correction for Barbarian Ravager to my notes, thanks much for the report! (Also correcting it on wiki, which is where I originally got that incorrect prereq from.)

If you want to correct it yourself now, open Data\Enhancements.txt in notepad and search for "aura of fear". Delete the line that says "All: Tier 2: Fear Me!"

[LrdSlvrhnd]

Thanks for the quick fix!

I have no idea *** I was doing with the import, other than I think I'd tried opening directly before and it hadn't worked... but that was also when I screwed up and so NOTHING was working (I'd accidentally moved the program instead of making a shortcut, oops).

I was also gonna suggest a field where you could give notes to yourself (such as past lives, settings for looks when you reincarnate, etc.) and then saw that you already had one, so thanks for that *g*

Really liking playing with the enhancement leveling guide, that's really nice!

[EllisDee37]

Really liking playing with the enhancement leveling guide, that's really nice!

Thanks much, I appreciate it.

I've been wanting to add the leveling guide since day 1, but it was touch and go there for a bit whether or not I'd get it included in 2.0. When we got our first preview of level 30 back in late October/early November I started working on 2.0, and since it was obviously going to be a long time before U29 went live I focused on infrastructure for around a month: multi-window support, displaying error messages in details windows, the help window features (and writing the help text), rewriting options & colors from scratch, etc... Then I spent a couple/few weeks on alternate & exchange feats and redoing the overview screen.

I didn't really start working on the Leveling Guide until after U29 went live, and it didn't go smoothly. Example: I didn't realize there needed to be a way to choose selectors until after I set up the screen layout. Doh!

The worst by far was just the mechanics of the screen itself. Like every other custom control in the program, the grid is a user-drawn picturebox. (It's literally just a bunch of line and rectangle drawing commands.) But everything about it is super complex from a coding pov. Adding "thicker' lines between levels took me two days all by itself due to conflicts with the "active" cell logic that highlights what cell the mouse is over, but without them the whole grid started running together and became super confusing to use. Drag-scrolling, moving/deleting multi-selections (which may not be contiguous); everything about that stupid grid was a nightmare. heh. And I felt time pressure the whole time since U29 was already live.

The prereqs logic was also super difficult, since they take into account both tree resets and feat swaps. And levels aren't stored; they're recalculated on the fly after any change to the grid. All that combined to make the (huge) loop that generates error descriptions so complex it broke the VB6 compiler. The compiler actually just hung, going into an infinite loop that left object files strewn about my hard drive after killing the process in task manager. So I had to rewrite a large section of perfectly valid code simply because it was too complex for the compiler to handle.

Fortunately, after thousands of lines of code I was able to get it all working, and nobody is happier than me. Now I can finally delete countless old spreadsheets.

EDIT: The great irony is that I expect most people won't even use it. But I never cared about that; the leveling guide is one of the few features I wrote purely for myself.

[Rhunellin]

Ty EllisDee37 for your amazing program v2.0

[ArekDorun]

First, I love your builder. It's by far the best of the available options, imo.

Now, a request: Proboards-format bbcode list support. Here's an example of how it needs to be done, taken from the bbcode of one of my own builds:

[u]Enhancements[/u] (80 AP)

Thief-Acrobat (39 AP)
[ul][li]Staff Control, Stick Fighting, Tumbler
[ol][li]Acrobat Staff Training, Thief Acrobatics III, Sly Flourish III
[/li][li]Acrobat Staff Training, Quick Strike III
[/li][li]Acrobat Staff Training, Improved Glancing Blows III, Shadow Dodge II
[/li][li]Acrobat Staff Training, No Mercy III
[/li][li]Acrobat Staff Training, Staff Specialization, Spinning Staff Wall
[/li][/ol][/li][/ul]

I can get close in options, by setting bullets to [ul] and numbered to [ol], but this doesn't solve the problem that all list items are still handled with unclosed [*] tags, which probaords won't parse or convert despite them being what was used in older versions of proboards. There's another problem as well: Because of the way proboards handles newlines, if you do something like this:

[ul]
[li]Item 1[/li]
[li]Item 2[/li]
[/ul]

it will come out looking something like this:

 * Item 1

 * Item 2

Note all the extra whitespace...that's because for some reason proboards keeps that extra newline when it sees it between 2 list elements like that. This means that just allowing me to specify opening and closing list tags work right unless I have the option to "remove whitespace between list tags". Ideally, I should be allowed to specify opening (and closing) tags for "first list item" and "other list items". This would also indirectly allow the output to be html-formatted instead of bbcode-formatted, if desired, and would allow me to keep the bbcode (or html) neat.

--ArekDorun

P.S. I wish I could help you implement this myself, but I don't have a VB6 compiler available.

[EllisDee37]

Great feedback. Yeah, I can definitely add support for proboards codes, and will for the next update.

Fixing your whitespace issues might fix the Win10 whitespace issue at the same time, but be aware that this might end up being too complicated. The list loops are kind of nuts on the complexity scale, especially when it gets dialed to 11 like for tree resets in the leveling guide. But I'll do my best.

[ArekDorun]

Great feedback. Yeah, I can definitely add support for proboards codes, and will for the next update.

Fixing your whitespace issues might fix the Win10 whitespace issue at the same time, but be aware that this might end up being too complicated. The list loops are kind of nuts on the complexity scale, especially when it gets dialed to 11 like for tree resets in the leveling guide. But I'll do my best.

Win10 Whitespace issue...does your output window use HTML? If so, that's the core of the problem, and can be fixed by removing unnecessary whitespace between tags. I suspected this wrt Proboards, which does only minimal parsing on bbcodes, simply converting them directly to HTML where possible (I abuse this to get a vbulletin-style "codebox" for my builds...I'd show you, but our forum is private).

TL;DR: If you can't do both the open and close tags on the same line and put the newline before the closing tag due to complexity killing the compiler, just remove newlines between list tags entirely. Yes, this makes the resulting code harder to read, but should also fix the whitespace problems once and for all.

--ArekDorun

[EllisDee37]

No issue with the compiler on output; that logic is straightforward. The complexity is due to the same code loop handling all output, both to the screen and the export window, regardless what bbcodes you use or if you use any at all. As it stands now, if I removed the linefeeds in list lines they would also be removed from screen display and when generating Plain Text output. But that's a simple fix, since list codes are handled in their own tiny little function, so that should be quick and easy.

[Kantia]

I've found a repeatable crash bug in the enhancement level guide.

If I make an Iconic, I don't allocate points until level 15.
My way of doing this was to bank points at all levels until 15, so I have 56 AP banked.
Then when allocating 56 AP, it gets to a certain point and the application exits completely.

However it doesn't crash in the same way when using the "Reset all trees" option and re-allocating 56 points.