09-20-2010, 08:43 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: Hmm, looks like Earth, circa CE 2020+
|
GURPS Character Assistant 4 Did Something Weird
I had posted this in the GURPS forum at http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?p=1051400, but by Daigoro's suggestion copied it here.
I had something very weird happen with GURPS Character Assistant 4. Maybe someone can figure this out. I had an Old character (O) saved, and made up a New one (N). A few days later, I called up O, and noticed that the character's point total was way off. I checked, and learned that the advantages of N somehow got added to O as well. I might have thought I had just made a mistake, but it was more than a few advantages: Over two dozen clerical spells that N had were now also on O's sheet (O had no spells previously), and a few of these I had just created for N using the New Spell (Clerical) function. In addition the quirks I made for N were also on O's sheet (some of these quirks I created using the New Quirk function). On top of all this, the skills of character N were added to character O. Where they both had the same skills, the points spend on O's sheet were either changed to be the same as on character N's sheet, or they were added twice--for example, character O ended up with both Broadsword 1 pt. and Broadsword 4 pts. (a variation on this happened with Shield (Shield) and with Teaching.) I admit I am sometimes a bit absent minded, but even I'm not absent minded enough to have done all that without noticing. Frankly some of it I don't even know how to do. And in case anyone's thinking "virus" or the like, I have industry standard protection, just ran a scan that found nothing more than one low risk cookie which was removed, and updated my virus definitions 11 seconds before I scanned. |
09-20-2010, 08:43 PM | #2 |
Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: Hmm, looks like Earth, circa CE 2020+
|
Re: GURPS Character Assistant 4 Did Something Weird
Daigoro had responded
Note: This should be in the GCA forum. I've had something similar happen, I think when I've had 2 characters open at once and then maybe i haven't saved before hibernating my laptop. The result is a bunch of stuff from one character ends up on the other, or has benn completely overwritten. |
09-20-2010, 09:06 PM | #3 | |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
|
Re: GURPS Character Assistant 4 Did Something Weird
Quote:
At any rate, GCA seems to do this sort of thing occasionally. It tends to happen when you try to open a character before another one has finished loading. In general I find GCA tends to not multitask well, and it behooves one to just let it finish doing its thing, before doing anything else. Also when saving double check to make sure that none of these kinds of hiccups have occurred and save often. |
|
09-21-2010, 10:07 AM | #4 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Canada
|
Re: GURPS Character Assistant 4 Did Something Weird
What would be useful is a popup modal window with progress bar and a busywait animation when loading or saving a character, to ensure you don't end up trying to get it to open two at once and get the data mixed up.
Progress bar might be incremented after processing Attributes, then Advantages, Disadvantages, skills, spells, equipment, whatever. Each section of the GCA file. Obviously some would take longer than others but at least you'd get a sense of progress ;) The other approach, which I find amusingly accurate, is "This bar will animate randomly until the process is done" ;) I think anyone familiar with Microsoft OS's rather random "time to finish copying" estimates knows the feeling. I got to watch Windows 7 revise %age complete on something backwards and forwards for 15 minutes the other day.
__________________
All about Size Modifier; Unified Hit Location Table A Wiki for my F2F Group A neglected GURPS blog |
03-03-2011, 09:46 PM | #5 | |
Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: Hmm, looks like Earth, circa CE 2020+
|
Re: GURPS Character Assistant 4 Did Something Weird
Quote:
__________________
GURPS Fantasy Folk: Elves My first GURPS supplement Top 12 Clues You're a Role-Playing Old-Timer My humorous (I hope) article that also promotes SJGames/GURPS Kerry Thornley: Dwarf Planet Eris, Discordianism, and The John F. Kennedy Assassination Without Thornley, there would never have been the Steve Jackson Games edition of Principia Discordia |
|
03-04-2011, 05:42 AM | #6 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Canada
|
Re: GURPS Character Assistant 4 Did Something Weird
I was just thinking that instead of a progress bar, having a series of checkboxes for "Attributes saved, Advantages saved, Skills Saved, etc. would not only be more accurate, but avoid the "Progress bar has been stuck at 99% for the last 10 minutes" kind of annoyance.
I've never had GCA take NEARLY that long to save but y'all know what I mean - portions of the progress bar seem to take MUCH longer than others.
__________________
All about Size Modifier; Unified Hit Location Table A Wiki for my F2F Group A neglected GURPS blog |
03-04-2011, 01:37 PM | #7 | |
Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: Hmm, looks like Earth, circa CE 2020+
|
Re: GURPS Character Assistant 4 Did Something Weird
Quote:
__________________
GURPS Fantasy Folk: Elves My first GURPS supplement Top 12 Clues You're a Role-Playing Old-Timer My humorous (I hope) article that also promotes SJGames/GURPS Kerry Thornley: Dwarf Planet Eris, Discordianism, and The John F. Kennedy Assassination Without Thornley, there would never have been the Steve Jackson Games edition of Principia Discordia |
|
03-04-2011, 03:22 PM | #8 | |
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Jeffersonville, Ind.
|
Re: GURPS Character Assistant 4 Did Something Weird
On higher-end computers GCA works well enough for it not to be a problem, but when I ran it on my netbook or under Wine on a less-than high-end computer it becomes a problem.
I'll note it is especially a problem under Wine because there seems to be an additional performance hit beyond the usual hit for being Wine. But also since Wine doesn't run it perfectly the weird bugs that crop up from it doing two things at a time eventually lead to instability and crashes it. For delays under normal operation I'd probably just find a way to refuse/reject any new inputs until it's done working. For loads and saves some kind of "wait" dialog would make sense probably with some kind of information about what's being done. Possibly locking the application with a generic progress bar maybe 1" long (or however many pixels) at the bottom-left corner with a percent notation inside it and a text block next to it displaying what exactly is being done at that moment.
__________________
The user formerly known as ciaran_skye. __________________ Quirks: Doesn't proofread forum posts before clicking "Submit". [-1] Quote:
|
|
Tags |
character assistant, program |
|
|