Those who WANT to stay with GCB

[adm]

What are the chances that an upgrade patch for GCB 3E to GCB 4E, either Official or unoffical, free or at a nominal fee, will ever be approved/ released by SJGs?

Irritated GCB owner,
adm

[jahn]

Originally Posted by adm

What are the chances that an upgrade patch for GCB 3E to GCB 4E, either Official or unoffical, free or at a nominal fee, will ever be approved/ released by SJGs?

Since GURPS Character Builder (for 3rd Edition) and GURPS Character Assistant (for 4th Edition) are totally different programs written by two different people, I would say the chance is 0% GCA is not a modification of GCB so there is no way to patch (well, the patch would just replace one program with the other). So what you need to ask for is an upgrade discount price for current GCB owners.

[adm]

Originally Posted by jahn

So what you need to ask for is an upgrade discount price for current GCB owners.

Which, I believe, is what I asked for.

adm

[jahn]

Originally Posted by adm

Which, I believe, is what I asked for.

Hmm, I guess I misunderstood you. To me a patch is the fraction of the changes you need to update an application. Since in this case the patch would be the whole of the new application, it's not really a patch at all.

[adm]

Perhaps I should have been more clear, that was why I listed the fee option. My appologies if I snaped at you.

As someone who went with the Official Program, I am highly irritated that they now or going with the other program, and offering no way to upgrade our current charectors to boot.

adm

[laserdog]

What annoys me the most, is that GCB was clearly written with flexibility in mind. Modifying the stats and redoing the skills, advs and disads seems like a weekend task for someone really familiar with it...

(Clearly some stuff, like innate attacks, etc would be missing)

And yet, a half year later, no official patches or even a single game aid are available to help us bridge the gap to the release of GCA??

I guess I can understand them not wanting to dump resources into something they don't want to market anymore. But what about user submitted ones?

And while I have the utmost confidence in SJG not to make purely "evil" decisions, the glaring lack of any official 4th edition GCB stuff showing up anywhere seems kinda fishy to me.

I swear within a week of the release of 4th edition Lite I saw a half-dozen people saying they were working on GCB compatability for it. Did they all give up? Or did none of them choose to submit it?

[AOTA]

There might be things going on in the background that we don't know about that could be holding up any update of GCB. Instead of getting mad about try the GCA program and give them good feedback so when the final version comes out it will be a great program.

[Devin]

Originally Posted by laserdog

I swear within a week of the release of 4th edition Lite I saw a half-dozen people saying they were working on GCB compatability for it. Did they all give up? Or did none of them choose to submit it?

This was pretty heavily discussed on the Pyramid discussion groups at the time 4e was released (another advantage to a Pyramid subscription!) and the holdup is purely an internal hoop. Steve and the other folks who need to make the final decision have been really busy with the business of keeping supplements coming out and getting new product out the door and there are only so many hours in the day.

It hasn't been forgotten, so please stay patient.

[Steve Jackson]

Okay, that's not quite correct.

Until a couple of days ago, I had no idea this question was still out there. Thought it was settled, quite conclusively, months ago. Apparently there's been a great deal of stressing among people who want to do 4th edition templates for GCB. As far as I can see, nobody ever told them no, but somebody involved in the effort tried to turn this into a Game Aids license thing, which it isn't, and isn't going to be, and it's not the Game Aids coordinator's job to deal with templates or their creators.

So: I'm going to copy this note to Devin, Roberto, Kromm, and Andrew, just out of courtesy, but I personally have no idea who all is involved (day before yesterday was the first time I recall hearing of the "Mayhem Group," for instance). So if anyone encounters discussion elsewhere, point them here . . .

(1) GCB and GCA are two different programs, created by different people. GCB cannot be "patched" to GCA. And sorry, no, we're not going to distribute discounted copies of A to those who own B, any more than we distributed discounted copies of 4e to the 3e users. And for pretty much the same reasons: we decided it was time to start over from the ground up. Our future support will go to GCA.

(2) If it is possible to create 4e templates for GCB, we are happy that there are those who want to do it, and we have no desire to exercise any more control over the creation and distribution of such templates than we do over other GCB templates. Fans are welcome to create GCB templates and to host online collections of templates, provided the provisions of our Online Policy are followed. We ask that no one post a template unless they are willing to have it hosted in others' collections, and we ask that those who host collections have the courtesy to credit the original creators.

(3) From time to time we can add links from the GCB page to significant template collections, to make it easier for both old and new GCB users (yes, we realize there will be occasional new GCB users for at least as long as they make Windows boxes) to provide community support.

(4) (I can't tell if this was actually a serious question or just wistfulness) We will not distribute a third-party "update patch" for GCB. That would be a huge violation of our agreement with the GCB creator, who owns the underlying code.

[Devin]

Thank you, SJ, for helping get that cleared up. :)