DDI Downloader alternatives?
 

Ok, So I've tried this downloader three times in the last three days, the first was just after I had bought HeroLab, and was about 4 hours before my connection dropped off at midnight. Needless to say, it didn't finish.

So I tried it again the next day, starting it first thing in the morning, around 8:00, and let it run on my computer, nothing else running on the connection all day, and it ran all the way through to midnight again. And did not finish.

I got up earlier yesterday and ran it again, starting it around 5:00 and letting it run all day, uninterrupted. It did not finish.

Is there an Alternative to the downloader? Because as it is, I can't use this for 4e, because I have no data to run on it. I don't have the capacity to run it for as long as it needs apparently. If there's a Bulk file I could download faster, or maybe a torrent file that wouldn't care about my connection dropping?

It is quite frustrating.

Edit: For Progress, the furthest I've been able to get in the process is downloading the powers segment, and it got about 17? lines of ....... before time runs out.

How is your time running out? I've left it running for as long as 18-36 hours and not had a problem with time running out for me.

My internet goes down for about an hour at midnight.

Yeah, I can't get past rituals. I always get a string of !'s
It's a real shame that WOTC can't play nice with LW and collaborate on the data downloader for HL. It ought to be in their interest since they are at least guarenteed $10 from each person to subscribe for a month to gain access to the data.

There has to be a solution by which both companies and us, the players, can all be satisfied.

I love HL under 3.5, it's awesome. I was so excited to buy the licence for 4e, and now I'm pretty bummed that it's all going to be a waste of time. $20 to LW and $10 to WOTC, and nothing for it. $30 is totally worth the cost of the data... if I had the data, which I don't.

This is the kind of poor support that leads to piracy, and I hate that. All of us are prepared to pay both companies, but we're getting nothing for it, or at least some of us aren't. It sounds like some of you folks got lucky :)

Sorry, rant over. I just want my data so I can continue to enjoy HL!

I wonder if the ddidownloader could be altered to fetch specific sections, so that it doesn't have to run the whole thing all the time.

I have some other ideas for making it more fault tolerant too.

I'd love to see the api or feed spec for their web service.

Hey Lone Wolf guys, email me if you want some help rewriting the downloader? :) And no, I'm not being mean, just saying you probably have more important things to be working on, right? I'd be more than willing to take a crack at it. I can work with PHP, Java or C++.

Just FYI the source code to the downloader is here

C:\ProgramData\Hero Lab\data\4e\downloader

Oh it's all C++. Very cool. I'm going to have a snoop about in there. Thanks!

Has there been a Dec update to the DDI does anyone know and if so is it all workign in HL? I have some time and would love to run an update if there is new stuff since my NOV HL/DDI download.

I'm having similar problems as Zero Traveler. I've tried downloading the DDI data multiple times using both wireless connection and cable connection.

After the download completes I get the message that there was one error downloading and that there is a server error. The downloader then suggests that you can retry downloading the missing data a couple of hours later since the server error often fixes itself... but when I do so I get the same server error message again.

Without the DDI data (I have a subscription) Hero Labs isn't of much use to me :(

Has anyone else had similar experiences with the downloader and been able to fix them?

If there's one or two of those and the retry doesn't work, just select Skip instead of retry (after trying retry when it's almost done). HL will generate data files with what it has... So far my 20 or so 4e characters haven't been affected. Personally, I think it's bad data in the compendium that's referencing something that either no longer or never exist(s/ed)

Ok I'll give it another go and see what data will be present when I try to make a character.

I can get through the download perfectly (just takes a while) but as soon as the data tried to load the DDI download program fails, leaving my 4e ability dead. Any ideas?

I have a win7 basic netbook and tried running the program in compatibility mode with admin rights.

This is what happened to me as well when I used the "skip" alternative (I was running Windows in normal mode though).
Here are some images and system info, if it helps:

Download failing:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/69351/fail1.jpg

Program locks up:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/69351/skipfail.jpg

Program stops working:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/69351/crash.jpg

Here is some system info:
OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Professional
Version 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601
System Type x64-based PC
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9300 @ 2.50GHz, 2401 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date Phoenix Technologies LTD Z15N011, 9/30/2007
SMBIOS Version 2.4
Locale Sweden
Time Zone W. Europe Standard Time
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB
Total Physical Memory 4.00 GB
Available Physical Memory 1.57 GB
Total Virtual Memory 7.99 GB
Available Virtual Memory 5.60 GB
Page File Space 4.00 GB

I had the exact same thing happen to me yesterday when I tried to run it to update it. I wonder if there's some piece of funky data in that portion of data that causes it to crap out?

I've got a backup of the previous downloaded 4e data that I had that's in working shape. If you need that, I can email it to you so that you can get 4e back up and running until this is fixed.

I am glad I am not the only one. My patience is running thin on this process. today I am trying for the 3rd time on two different machines. Even the one that is wired is doing the same thing.

I want to stop DDI and throw more money at the Hero Labs folks, but until I can get my stuff into the Hero Lab software I have to continue to pay WotC :(

Help!

Thanks for the report, I'm looking into this problem now.

I'm going to retry running it this weekend to see if I get the same result.

Also, I might take a look at the source code to see whether it's worthwhile working on a native Mac alternative, or a pure Java one instead that can be used by both Mac and Windows.

Thanx for the offer. I'm OK for now though as it is at least two months left before I start up my new campaign (maybe I'll join the New Year Game thingy the Gnome Stew guys started http://www.newyearnewgame.com/)

I'm glad the developers start looking into the issue though. Good luck guys *cheers*

No worries. I'm currently in the middle of redownloading the Feats, as I want the updated files myself.

If any one is interested. Themes have been added to the compendium. Maybe that has caused some of the recent problems.

That would be typical... When the compendium changes, it typically breaks the downloader until Colen can fix it.

I just tried running it again, and it crapped out at the exact same place as before.

I have tried twice more on both my machines (Laptop/Desktop) and both Windows 7. It takes close to 18 hours complete only to freeze and give me the error.

I've just uploaded a new version of the data files that fix this error. You should now be able to complete the download successfully. Sorry guys!

Excellent! I'm running it now and will report on success/failure as soon as I can.

I also had a thought that running a two-stage DDI Downloader would be more effective in the future. The first program downloads all the files so that you have an offline cache of the m. The second program processes them. This would mean that if it's the processing that's breaking the entire conversion, you've already downloaded the data and there's no need to go through that entire process again, which is time and bandwidth consuming.

This sounds like a great idea. I've just started to download the data again with the updated file. Hope it works this time :)

I just finished the download and it seemed to import fine. However, there's a couple of things that seem to have borked. The first thing is that a LOT of data seems to be missing from the website. H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth, which was in a previous update is now missing. There's also a lot of empty path errors and missing file during processing according to the output log. I've saved a copy of that output log, and the .dat files that were created and I'm going to run it again.

The upshot is that the fixes to the downloader worked, but the data from Wizards seems to be broken a little.

Downloaded again (which only took 24 hours total). H2 is still missing, and getting the exact same parser errors about missing lookup IDs, source IDs etc. I've attached the output file here.

Just Ran DDI update today (well Sunday evening to this afternoon)
ran fine, This is for those of you that may not have run it in some time (I had not since Nov.)
races from the Heroes of the Feywild are now in. Magic items are in but does not have source tag/ appears in
No Feats, no Classes.
Themes still waiting on.

My Experience
 

I just ran it yesterday for the first time since I just purchased HL. It took just over 15 hours total time which is mind boggling to me. I assume this is a Wizards being difficult issue, but given that I could have downloaded every main stream movie from 2011 in high definition in the same amount of time...my god.

Obviously I'm joking, but I do have a 50Mb/s connection so I wasn't expecting it to take anywhere near that long. That being said it did seem to work fine and I had no issues once the process was finished, creating a character.

The product seems pretty solid and I like the features, but if there is anyway to speed up this process it would certainly be a big advantage.

-Shon