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AussieLauren
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Join Date: Dec 2009
Posts: 7

Old April 10th, 2010, 03:37 PM
Hi all, coming back to try hero lab again. Must say I'm still running into frustrations.

First things first, it seems that i have to run both the ddidownloader and hero lab itself as administrator in Win7 for it to work. that's not clear in the documentation. Reason for it is because all the datafiles seem to be written into a program directory - which is protected - so it needs administrator access in order to do so.

This is particularly frustrating with the downloader, because of frustration #2

It takes about 30 mins for the ddi downloader to import the non-subscriber information. However it took more than 9 hours yesterday to try and get the subscriber information - and as I hadn't run it in administrator mode, I lost all that information as soon as the downloader finished.

I should say, this is on a ~3.3Mbps internet connection, core i5 computer; I don't think the problem is on my hardware end of things.

Why does it take "3-4 hours" according to the documentation or "6-9 hours" in my experience to download something that's contained in a ~130Mb file which takes ~20 mins when we download the actual WOTC character builder? Why can't we simply pull the information from our hard-drive once the character builder has downloaded it?

Sorry for the rant but it's very frustrating to me. It seems like a very good program but I just can't practically use it with it like this, not when the WOTC character builder does many of the options nearly as good, and some of the more bizarre combinations simply work (remembering my spellscarred issues)

Cheers guys, will continue to try, but the tether is almost reached.

Edit - Just to note that after running for about 6 hours, it spammed "unexpected subscription page error" and basically stopped downloading. So it's now used my 5 downloads while in the middle of downloading the content, and I'm stuck for the month. *sigh*

Edit 2 - well, I guess I understand now, it's sifting through the DnD compendium page by page rather than pulling it from the character creator... *sigh* - but is there any way to get a resume feature? Or at least an option to only pull one section at a time?

Last edited by AussieLauren; April 11th, 2010 at 02:12 AM.
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Colen
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Old April 14th, 2010, 01:26 PM
Hi AussieLauren,

1) Until Windows 7, Hero Lab worked great without running in Administrator mode. However, win7 changed something (we're not sure what), and as a result Hero Lab must now run in Administrator mode under certain circumstances.

We've been working on a solution for this, but unfortunately it's not a simple thing to fix - Hero Lab is based on code that's been around for over 10 years, and over that time, Windows has introduced many new rules and guidelines for how to do things. We now need to go back through Hero Lab, find all of the points that rely on things being in the old locations, and fix them - and then make sure we don't break things for existing users while we do it.

I didn't realize the same problem applied to the 4e downloader - nobody has mentioned that before, and I hadn't encountered the problem myself. Based on your report, I'll get a solution for this implemented in the next downloader version, so it shouldn't be a problem in the future.


2) Wizards doesn't make a "download all data" option available to us, so our only option for 4e is to download thousands of small pages of data, one at a time. The WotC character builder has access to the big chunk of raw data, but unfortunately we don't have that luxury.

Because we have to make thousands of small requests to download the data, there's nothing we can really do to speed it up - each file downloads very quickly, but there's some overhead involved in starting the download for each one. Theoretically we could start downloading file B more quickly after file A has downloaded, but we don't want to "flood" the wizards server with requests - that might cause problems for their other users.

As you've noticed, the downloader can sometimes run into problems with the WotC servers returning incorrect results for a time - for example, they sometimes display the "Subscribe to D&D insider to see this page!" message, even when you're logged in. Originally I hoped this problem would go away, but it seems to be getting worse over time, so I'll need to look at it and see if we can handle that situation (and resuming a download) in a better way.

The good news is that since we don't use the D&D insider download mechanism, downloading the content into Hero Lab doesn't use any of your "downloads" for the month, so you're still free to download the official character builder and install it on up to 5 machines, even if you use Hero Lab.


Hope this helps!
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vardeman
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Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: Earth (Sol III)
Posts: 105

Old May 3rd, 2010, 04:41 PM
I'm having d/l problems with the ddidownloader as well. My connection isn't the most stable in the world and as a result it is very difficult to get a working copy. Many times even when it looks like I still have a good connection the downloader will stop in the middle and say "Press any key to quit.", and I'll have to start all over again.

V
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Colen
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Old May 5th, 2010, 02:58 PM
varderman, does the downloader give any error message other than that? Or does it just stop in the middle of the download?

I'm working on a new version of the downloader right now - I'll definitely try to add some more resilience to the downloading logic, since more and more people seem to be having problems with it.
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vardeman
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Old May 5th, 2010, 07:34 PM
I can't seem to be able to copy the text from the downloader window, but when it stops, it just stops with no other messages.

V
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vardeman
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Old May 12th, 2010, 05:19 PM
Colin, I found a way to capture the ddidownloader screen. Here is what happens.

Code:
**********************************************************

1. Download data (no D&D insider account)
2. Download data (with D&D insider account)
d. Delete existing data
x. Exit

IMPORTANT NOTE:
The downloader does not save your login information
anywhere - it is only used to log in to D&D insider,
and then discarded.

Enter your D&D insider username (email address) and press enter: xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxx.xxx

Enter your D&D insider password and press enter: xxxxxxxx
Connected to server...
Login succeeded.
Retrieving deity index... done.
Retrieving skill index... done.
Retrieving ritual index...

Press any key to quit.
It happens in different places during different download attempts. It doesn't always happen.

V
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VideoGeek
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Join Date: Sep 2010
Posts: 17

Old December 5th, 2010, 01:04 AM
I've been running the ddi downloader for a day solid now, and I'm still not through the items yet, and haven't even started on anything after that. Is there any way to get this to work, 'cause I can't leave this up all week.
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Colen
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Old December 13th, 2010, 11:11 PM
Hi VideoGeek,

I hope your download worked out for you. Unfortunately, the nature of the downloader is that it requires you to download a bunch of small files. Each individual file takes virtually no time at all to download - often the individual files are just a few lines of text. However, there's a fixed time cost associated with each one. The downloader has to ask the server "Give me file X, please", and the server has to send the file back.

Assuming that your internet connection has even 0.25 seconds of "lag", that means that every download will take at least half a second - 1/4 of a second for the message to get to the server, and 1/4 of a second for the reply to get back. If your internet connection is slower, then each download will take correspondingly longer. The server also takes some time to process your request, but typically this is less than the time the information takes to get back to you (servers can answer requests pretty speedily).

Unfortunately there's really nothing that the downloader can do about this. If it's taking you a full day just to get through the items, then each one must be taking several seconds to complete - it isn't normal for a few paragraphs of text to take that long to download over the internet. Are you sure your internet connection is working properly? if you have a high latency, it might be something you could ask your ISP to look into.

Hope this helps...
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Colen
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Old December 13th, 2010, 11:12 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by vardeman View Post
Colin, I found a way to capture the ddidownloader screen. Here is what happens.

(snip)

It happens in different places during different download attempts. It doesn't always happen.

V
Thanks, vardeman. I'm not sure what could be causing that; the next time it happens, can you please email me the output.txt file it puts in your HeroLab\data\4e folder to colen@wolflair.com? Hopefully there's something in there that will lead me to the problem...
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Samaritan
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Posts: 9

Old January 8th, 2011, 01:17 PM
To clarify for folks here- I'm on a Verizon FIOS connection, and even then it took me several (I estimate 9, maybe?) hours to complete the download. There were times I thought it was interrupted (I'd get exclamation points showing up now and again), but it seems to work fine once the download completed.

As a fellow user, all I can suggest is waiting it out. *shrug*
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