Character Builder Lite

[Kinerd]

ahaha, these things happen

when the update is released i'll post again with any changes it turns out we need to make

[Psiandron]

I just wanted to thank you guys for your hard work updating the planner. Well done!!

[EllisDee37]

Hey all, got an email that people were trying to keep this up to date. Just thought I'd check in to say go for it, that's awesome. There is a very small chance I might jump back into this if the data is up to date; the update where all the epic destinies changed kind of killed what little motivation I still had for working on it. It's highly unlikely, but possible.

I don't have his wikicrawler

You do, actually, but you need VB6 to use it. The crawler is built into the character builder directly, but is hidden when running the compiled exe. If you run the source code from the IDE, the wiki crawler appears in the Tools menu.

The crawler ONLY updates descriptions. No ability names, no AP costs, no nothing. Just descriptions. Takes about 10 minutes to run. If you do use it, I stopped crawling spells a long time ago and then updated spell descriptions as they changed by hand. It's almost guaranteed the wiki pages that are crawled for spells are not up to date (they never were up to date) so I would recommend skipping spells and just crawling enhancements and destinies.

EDIT: Just took a look. The crawler is found via Tools => Refresh Data, and choose the "Refresh Trees" button. That will update all enhancement and destiny trees, but skip the spells. Spell descriptions need to be maintained by hand, but they don't change much so it's not that much of a hassle.

[C-Dog]

WB, if only briefly. Your lasting contributions to the game are appreciated, and your presence missed. GL out doing whatever your new free time allows you!
o/

[adrian69]

SSG should do one of their own just for shivs and goggles. I'd pay 10-20 dollars for a thorough and concise planner with some artwork and lore stuff, and that auto-updated with patches/updates/hotfixes. They should have the ability to do something like this. Something with the option to be minimalist like Ellisdee's or the ability to map out almost every detail with stats, etc, by level like Ron's.

I appreciate the work Ellisdee put in to this and it's worth that at least, if not more.

[krolikru3]

Great stuff!

Are you waiting for alchemist to release to add it to the character customizer. I'd like to mess around with some theory builds with alchemist. Was wondering if you're planning on implementing that soon.

[krolikru3]

Also, I can't change my build to 36 point. It's greyed out for some reason. Can only go up to 32 pt

[Ordinary]

SSG should do one of their own just for shivs and goggles. I'd pay 10-20 dollars for a thorough and concise planner with some artwork and lore stuff, and that auto-updated with patches/updates/hotfixes. They should have the ability to do something like this. Something with the option to be minimalist like Ellisdee's or the ability to map out almost every detail with stats, etc, by level like Ron's.

I appreciate the work Ellisdee put in to this and it's worth that at least, if not more.

My character planner allows you to get right down to the details. Link in my signature.

[Ordinary]

Great stuff!

Are you waiting for alchemist to release to add it to the character customizer. I'd like to mess around with some theory builds with alchemist. Was wondering if you're planning on implementing that soon.

Build 95 released yesterday of my planner supports Alchemist as seen on Lamannia. Just missing the spell descriptions at the moment.

[Kinerd]

Great stuff!

Are you waiting for alchemist to release to add it to the character customizer. I'd like to mess around with some theory builds with alchemist. Was wondering if you're planning on implementing that soon.

i checked and the classes are in a straightforward txt file too but to get the program to actually read them we have to get into the source code, which means we'd have to compile and upload the actual .exe somewhere. this isn't impossible obviously but it's going to require more than a simple c/p off the forums. once the update goes live i was intending on doing enhancements/destinies again anyway, if no one else has taken care of alchemist by then i'll look into it too

of course, if we really wanted to we could just edit the txt for (say) favored soul to be what artificer is, then you could just use the planner that way mentally substituting alchemist where it said favored soul (or whatever class you didn't happen to be using in that build)

[krolikru3]

Build 95 released yesterday of my planner supports Alchemist as seen on Lamannia. Just missing the spell descriptions at the moment.

Legendary Solid Sound is missing from item list. Quest found: Soul Survivor

[Amundir]

I may look into throwing the CBL into a public github repo, that would allow people to download it, and also to make update requests to. If anyone would be interested in such a setup.

[Nimdeadlee]

I would love to work on this and add Alchemist, but it is written in VB6. Such a shame as it's the best Character Builder tool IMO, but getting a compiler & IDE for VB6 is very difficult.

[Amundir]

I hadn't actually started looking at what all would be involved with getting the Alchemist added to the program. Looks like to add the icon the program will have to be changed in the source. Wish those were externalized. Oh well. Guess at some point I'll start playing around with Visual Studios.

[Nimdeadlee]

Guess at some point I'll start playing around with Visual Studios.

It's a non-trivial exercise. Given VB6 hasn't been supported by VS for about 15 years you'll either have to get a 2nd hand copy from EBay ($100+) or find a legacy version of VS online that can convert a VB6 project into .NET. Given this process is automated it can (and will) produce both semantic and syntactic errors, expect a few hundred. If the code is not well commented (and there's no reason to expect it should be if it's a private project) then the process of remediating these errors will probably take a great deal of time - especially if you aren't fluent in both VB6 and .NET.

[Amundir]

I found a quasi sketchy site and downloaded an iso for visual studios '07, but havent gotten up the nerve yet to try running it, lol. I did figure out though how to add the alchemist icon to the source code. Compiling is just my big hang up at this point

[EllisDee37]

It's a non-trivial exercise. Given VB6 hasn't been supported by VS for about 15 years you'll either have to get a 2nd hand copy from EBay ($100+) or find a legacy version of VS online that can convert a VB6 project into .NET. Given this process is automated it can (and will) produce both semantic and syntactic errors, expect a few hundred. If the code is not well commented (and there's no reason to expect it should be if it's a private project) then the process of remediating these errors will probably take a great deal of time - especially if you aren't fluent in both VB6 and .NET.

It can't be autoconverted to .NET in any way because of two key issues:

1) .NET doesn't have control arrays, and pretty much every screen uses control arrays extensively

2) .NET doesn't support printing text in pictureboxes. Almost every single bit of text in all 3 DDO Lite tools is generated by printing text in pictureboxes. The compendium, for example, would end up as a solid black screen with a couple buttons in the top right; no quest list at all.


On the other hand, because all of my source code is native VB6 -- no components or references at all -- you get two main benefits:

1) Easy to compile. If you have VB6, you can compile everything. No hunting for the right commoncontrols.dll or (worse) specialized 3rd party controls.

2) Widely compatible. Native VB6 is natively supported by Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10 with no installation of any kind required. It even runs on Linux using Wine.

[ChicagoChris]

It can't be autoconverted to .NET in any way because of two key issues:

1) .NET doesn't have control arrays, and pretty much every screen uses control arrays extensively

2) .NET doesn't support printing text in pictureboxes. Almost every single bit of text in all 3 DDO Lite tools is generated by printing text in pictureboxes. The compendium, for example, would end up as a solid black screen with a couple buttons in the top right; no quest list at all.


On the other hand, because all of my source code is native VB6 -- no components or references at all -- you get two main benefits:

1) Easy to compile. If you have VB6, you can compile everything. No hunting for the right commoncontrols.dll or (worse) specialized 3rd party controls.

2) Widely compatible. Native VB6 is natively supported by Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10 with no installation of any kind required. It even runs on Linux using Wine.

I did run the VB6 to VB.Net converter on it a couple of years ago and the control arrays were the main issue.

Certainly not something that would be easily changed, but I still believe it should be done for a couple of reasons.

1. Longevity - VB6's IDE currently has no mainstream supported installation on Windows 10.
2. VB6 runtimes are not guaranteed to be supported in any further Win10 releases. I can't imagine MS breaking it, but it would not be unprecedented.
3. Better open source control support through GitHub etc by moving to Visual studio/VSCode and a .Net language.
4. No support for ARM or non-windows OS's.

The last one is an interesting beast to conquer. The main cross-platform UI toolset currently is Electron (Chromium+node) - think Discord, Slack, Twitch etc. There's a couple of .Net based tools that look interesting (https://avaloniaui.net/) or even Blazor on .Net. You'd have to do the switch to C#, but that's not overly hard.

If I were doing it, I'd probably aim for moving from VB6 to C# and WPF, then shifting to .Net core and a cross platform UI.

And yes, I understand the desire to not change. I'm old enough to have grown up developing in VB. I still have my VB 1.0 floppies. But given that this can be converted and moved into a modern environment with *free* development tools that would trivially run on Win/Mac/Linux is certainly desirable.

[unbongwah]

If I were doing it, I'd probably aim for moving from VB6 to C# and WPF, then shifting to .Net core and a cross platform UI.

And yes, I understand the desire to not change. I'm old enough to have grown up developing in VB. I still have my VB 1.0 floppies. But given that this can be converted and moved into a modern environment with *free* development tools that would trivially run on Win/Mac/Linux is certainly desirable.

Are you volunteering to do it? The original source code is in the first post. And Amundir setup a GitHub page.

[Thunder-Monkey]

Are you volunteering to do it? The original source code is in the first post. And Amundir setup a GitHub page.

REALLY appreciate you guys working on this, i know there are other planners now, I have looked at them and this is still my fave - it's just so quick and easy!

If you are looking for encouragement to continue the work.... PLEASE CONTINUE THE WORK! (from me and my guildies and alliance buddies)

Also... post 1000 yay!

TM