Rant.

[swestrup]

A few days ago I downloaded the "Hero Designer" program for designing characters/items/things for the Hero System RPG. Now the Hero System is extremely flexible and extremely configurable, and so folks were promised a highly configurable designer. I was actually on the beta tester's list for this program before it went public and I complained about its problems then. Well, now that I can look at the 'final' version (bug fixes come out almost daily) I have this to say about it: YUCK! You couldn't pay me enough to use this piece of crap!  Here's whats wrong with it:

1. The thing is written in Java and is slooooow. I complained about the speed during Beta and was told it would be optimized once it worked. Well, they're selling it now and its even slower (and my machine is 10x the speed of when I was a beta tester!) It takes something like 3 minutes for the program to load.
2. Its not very flexible. For example, there is a drop down list for eye color in the character description. Two eyes of different color are NOT an option. Sheesh. You CAN disable eyecolor for creatures without eyes, but that's as far as they went.
3. There are dynamically created forms to fill out where you select advantages, limitations, powers, talents, etc. Now in the Hero System all of these are soft. The standard sets are GM modifiable (and most do). You CAN modify existing power (but cannot add new ones) and you can create new advantages, etc, but you have to do it by editing XML templates. UGH. There is NO GUI for doing this (extremely common) tweaking.
4. Even when you look at the XML templates you realize that its (mostly) just giving values to named tags and the tags are all hardcoded. Do you want the vultruns to be able to specify the color of their snees? Tough. Oh, you can say, "They don't have ears, I'll rename them", but ears don't have a color attribute, so you're hosed.
   
5. The GUI design is pretty bad. I wanted to start at the beginning by stating the Campaign rules. After all, without deciding what house rules you have, you don't have any basis for building. Well, you can't edit house rules without having a character open (why???), so I had to create a fake one. Then, of course, you only get a few checkboxes for the house rules and the XML template for house rules just states the current values of the checkboxes. There is NO WAY to state that spells are 1/2 price, or that swords are free, or that everyone MUST have measles. You have to check each submitted player sheet by hand to verify this stuff. I thought this was supposed to be computerized???
6. There is a mention at the beginning that some values would differ from those given in the rules because they use 'formulas, not tables' to generate the numbers. WTF? Okay, I know the progression 10, 20, 40, 80, 160, 320, 640, 1250, 2500, 5000, 10000 looks broken to someone who thinks in binary, but it just means each step is multiplied by the 10th root of 1000 (~1.995262315), not by 2. With a simple bit of rounding you get the standard progression. Instead they opted to give the WRONG (binary) answer because they weren't smart enough (or didn't bother to try) to find a numerical pattern.
7. The ONE good thing about the program is that its in Java, so I have the source, so some things could be fixed, but its NOT open source, so I can't submit my changes to anyone with any expectation of them being juded on their merits. Whats worse, is that it ALL needs fixing, and I'm not about to tackle that job. I strongly suspect that there isn't any baby in this bathwater.

I suppose there is ONE other good thing that came from this: I'm not tempted to buy the product. If I found that it did what I needed, and sped up my GMing work, I would find it mighty hard to justify not buying a legit copy, and I honestly can't afford to do that right now. As is, my concience is clear, cause this sucker is getting deleted. So now I'm fuming at the crap that people are foisting off on us as useable software. I mean, they take a heck of a lot more care than that when they edit the books, so you'd think they would care about how the program works!

Oh well, maybe I'll try to go to sleep again now.

Comments

[labyrinthman.livejournal.com]

Its not the first time a RPG company has dropped the ball when it came to software. Does anyone else remember the travesty that was the Palladium Character Generator they were selling a number of years back?

I can't believe I paid for that tripe.

The D&D one sent out with 3e wasn't very good at all either.

[ims.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I did pay for it. :(

I believe there is an alternative: I think there is now a Hero 5th template for Metacreator. (I payed for *that*, too, back when, but I went and lost it by mistake :( ). But Metacreator is far from perfect too, of course.....

Re: Metacreator.

[swestrup]

Dang, Metacreator is what I wanted to check out next. What's wrong with it?

[ims.livejournal.com]

I can't exactly recall, by this point. What was good about it was you could do character generators for most game systems in it (of course this greatly resembles programming). What was not so good IIRC was (a) the language you do this is is far from as neat as it could be and (b) because it wasn't optimised for Hero, I seem to recall it took more mouse-click to, say, add a Limitation than it ideally should.

Still, I wouldn't discourage you from looking at it. I may go back to it myself, now there's a Hero 5th template. At least if I can convince them I bought a copy and don't have to pay over again.