Hi,
I love the idea of this software, but I have several issues with it, from a user's perspective. This may sound harsher than it is intended, but below are my issues with the software and some of the issues I have met when trying to make use of it.
- Why is the skill ranks from race, profession and adolescent portrayed in such a confusing manner? I gather I have to fill out some of the ranks myself, as they are free ranks, 5 from human, 20 from pilot ... but the whole GUI is a bit confusing and not clear about where things comes from.
Adding ranks from the race, profession and adolescent is actually convoluted from the start. From a pen and paper perspective you have to add the ranks from the adolescence table, then you need to add ranks based on profession and then you need to add ranks based on race, and then the free ranks, and so on and so on. My solution to that was to make the whole thing linear. Sure you get a lot of repetition, but in the end it seemed like the right direction. The biggest thing from a New Character builder is knowing you are dealing with a software "wizard". Wizard being the term for a program that "builds" something for you automatically however you need to go through some "steps". Adolscence ranks is complicated but it's not entirely complex. The idea with Page 3 is to simply take the adolscence property list (the stuff on the right), start on the top and just work your way down. You have a number of sections, separated by the description of what you are adding and the list of skills/subskills you can add it to. You also have the number of ranks remaining to add to this particular section. There may be even some text that tells you exactly what to do.
So, in summary, start from the top, check out the small description and add the ranks to the skills you desire to have ranks added to. The program is designed to be as flexible as possible, so for me to add logic that manually checks skills and subskills added for very particular scenarios of adding adolescence ranks was a bit daunting. I may do that later though.
- Also, how do I apply Skill Flexibility? And does this have to be done manually when I apply skill ranks? It's not clear.
This must be done manually right now. I could add another step in case a person has this particular talent. But right now, you go to the skill tab, click the skill and cost column and change the cost there.
- Why can't skill specialisations, and similar profession abilities, be done in a more orderly fashion rather than being a manual task in the skill rank add window when you level up... what do you do if you forget about it and need to add it later? Remove 1 level and add it again or is there an edit function I haven't found?
It's been a while since I have coded that particular area of the program but my guess was the daunting nature of coding something for it. It seemed so much easier and practical to just do this manually. You can add skill specializations at any time. You don't have to delete a level. In fact you never really have to delete levels unless you want your character to go down a level. You can always adjust ANYTHING you want on your character sheet. If the option is not available to edit in the software you can edit the XML itself and that will work as well.
- I've had 2 issues when trying to print: 1) the printout is not great as text goes missing as it's placed under the "line", and 2) printing to PDF results in hundreds of pages ...
This sounds like a bug and I will look into it. I have limitations when it comes to the static DC printing with windows. This is why I am moving to the HTML print. It removes many of the limitations, or just plain daunting code in order to get things lined up and on the right page.
Sorry for the confusion. I can look into making things a bit easier in the future. [/list]