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I think only the character builder would be unavailable to me (why would they not make this in Java to begin with?).  I guess I just want to know - from those of you who are subscribers - is the rest of the DDI content worth the subscription?

Jan 31, 2010 -- 9:27AM, ToddBS wrote:

I think only the character builder would be unavailable to me (why would they not make this in Java to begin with?).  I guess I just want to know - from those of you who are subscribers - is the rest of the DDI content worth the subscription?

Unfortunately, the Adventure Tools are also Windows only.

WotC ignoring non-Windows users is very annoying. I shelled out 70 bucks for a 1-year subscription, but I can't use most of the features because I don't own a Windows PC (or rather, the old Windows laptop that's somewhere around here is old and half-broken). I don't know the user statistics of wizards.com, but it's safe to assume that 10% or more of D&D players are Mac or Linux (or BSD etc.) users.

Dear Wizards, when will we finally get a character builder that works in the Web Browser!? We are paying customers and this problem makes us think very hard before renewing our subscription. Can you afford to lose 10% of your customers?

Jan 28, 2010 -- 7:21AM, mudbunny wrote:

This is from elf, one of the (ex)-devs on DDI tools and macs:

I would have love to have done a mac version. I have a mac. I also have an iphone.

When I originally joined the project though I was given a 6 month time frame to full release, 3 months to beta, and by the way, that includes the time I could spend hiring a staff. Staff was, fortunately, hired in short order, and I was lucky to get some great people on the team. With the short schedule though we were making decisions between releasing it as a web app, or perhaps winforms. We mocked up a web app and it wasn't responsive enough, we mocked up a winforms prototype, and it was slow and lacked the ability to do all the things we wanted to do so we ported to WPF which set us back a week but was so worth it. We were able to do more things, have better control of the UI and development time was very fast.

Given the short schedule that we had it wouldn't have been reasonable to make a multi-platform version. Once we were done with the initial build I did cost out what it would take to make a mac version, as I think it is short sighted not to make one. The problem being that Wizards just doesn't have enough mac customers yet. They would need something like 10 times as many in order for it to break even, and that's not counting the fact that the majority of mac users can run windows apps in some sort of vm setup.

It's also entirely possible that by the time there are enough mac customers there will also be either native osx support for wpf, or some sort of rapid development tool for mac/iphone that could be trivially ported too. It's also possible that with the coming release of windows7 that XP will drop in price so much that it doesn't make sense not to have a copy running in a vm with your mac.

 

Now, does this mean that WotC will never port the tools to macs?? No. However (and this is just my opinion, and is not based on any insider info or anything like that) right now the focus of WotC is on delivering high-quality tools. While I am reasonably certain that porting the tools to macs are on a list of things to do, getting out the rest of the tools is much, much higher on the priority list.

Switching to porting now would mean a complete change in focus, in addition to the hiring of a new development team (I assume that the current team has no experience in porting from one OS to another), which would significantly delay any further tools release.

DDI is a relatively (for a company that needs to look at the long term) recent addition to the WotC stable. Before they start changing how it works or dramatically changing the offerings, they need to obtain some decent baseline statistics, over several quarters at the very least, of subscription numbers. When a tool is released, how long does the hump last? Is there a change due to holidays? Summer? Campaign settings being released?

Mudbunny why don't you just put this in a thread entitled "Answer to questions about DDI and Macs" and sticky it. That way we can all just save ourselves some time getting to it.

Well, I went ahead and tried it out if for no other reason than the compendium looks good and the magazine articles.  Of course, I can't access it yet.  Hopefully the subscription won't take until the next business day (3 days from now) to show up.

I have Parallels and WinXP installed.  I may try to see if it still works (haven't had need to use it in over a year.  It doesn't seem right that of all things the D&D character builder would necessitate me to once again resort to it).  Of course, installing the .NET 3.5 runtime might require more space than what I have partitioned...

Edit: scratch that.  Apparently Parallels 2.2 won't even launch on Snow Leopard.  Nice.  I was still running Tiger last time I used it.

Edit2: I see my DDI icon now.  Coolness is about to commence.