It's been a while since I've heard any news on the general feature system that's been talked about by DDB for a long time, is it still in the works?  Cancelled?

Thanks!

It's the massive upgrade they're doing to the backend systems to hopefully fix a lot of the long-standing bugs, such as the inability to swap out a spell if your subclass allows for it, or to allow certain magic items to function on the character sheet instead of having a text description only. I'm sure it's in the works and has not been abandoned, as it's been demonstrated that WotC is going to keep developing D&D in a way that requires that additional flexibility. Also, there have been a handful of quiet code pushes lately that have broken stuff and then been fixed, so there's certainly evidence of stuff being worked on, even though they haven't told us what. They tend to be extremely tight-lipped about progress, and the general user won't know a new feature is coming until it's live.

It's in development.  They also have to keep up with Wizards' increased release cadence, however.  Implementing new books in their system is still their primary job, their whole company comes apart if they 'miss' a book.  General Feature System is a catch-up mechanic they hope to use to implement things they haven't been able to, but which is not destroying their business to have nonfunctional.  It may be hurting their business, but not destroying it the way missing a book would.

I dunno, they missed a big chunk of Theros and don't seem too concerned with it.

Don't want to seem unappreciative of the devs. They can only do so much with what they are given.

I don't remember exactly where but they still mention the general feature system in their video weekly update.  I know I've heard it mentioned in the last few weeks. 

I'm just assuming its complicated.  Their updates seem to take a lot of time though it might be that we are hungry for them it seems extra long.

The General Features System is something roughly analogous to redesigning a car that was originally built to work on nothing but strictly gasoline into being able to run on hybrid ethanol fuel, anything else, and also work off hybrid electric power...while the car is still driving down the road and actively in use.  DDB is having to change a lot of the core, immutable rules the system was originally built on, redo their underlying framework, and accomplish this without disrupting the experiences of millions of users.

It is, as they say, complicated.

Remember when we all pretended that this was a thing?

...see my post immediately above yours from two months ago.

if they could get this programmed and done in a week, they would.  They could absolutely shorten up the time, drastically...provided they wiped their database clean, deleted every single character and every single piece of stored homebrew in the system, and redid the whole thing from scratch with no burden of preserving existing user content.

How do you feel about that notion?  You down?  Ready to wave sayonara to all your stuff and wait a couple of months for them to do a feature sprint for the General Features System sans all pre-existing user data?  Nah?  Yeah, didn't think so, me either.

They managed Tasha's Cauldron and alternative class features.  They'll get to General Features.  Eat your holiday ham and exercise patience.

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

if they could get this programmed and done in a week, they would.  They could absolutely shorten up the time, drastically...provided they wiped their database clean, deleted every single character and every single piece of stored homebrew in the system, and redid the whole thing from scratch with no burden of preserving existing user content.

Hm... That is an interesting idea.

I am not sure if I would be opposed to them wiping everything and redid the system from scratch, if that results in features being implemented quicker and having more flexibility. I would lose a lot of UA content I tried to preserve and it would take ages for me to homebrew them back in, but I assume it would also mean that we can homebrew stuff that is more difficult or impossible to homebrew stuff from UA before.

If there is a vote right now on whether we should wipe everything and build from scratch with the upside being more featues and quicker development time, I think I lean a teensy-tiny bit towards wiping everything. Although since I am losing a ton of UA stuff that I cannot just simply copy-pasta any more, I will probably flip flop back and forth on the decision. If they are redoing the homebrew tools too to have a better UI and make it easier to navigate, I think I will lean in favor of wiping everything.

Not sure how many users would share my sentiment though, and I assume many users with a ton of homebrew and characters would oppose the wipe, which is understandable.

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

...see my post immediately above yours from two months ago.

if they could get this programmed and done in a week, they would.  They could absolutely shorten up the time, drastically...provided they wiped their database clean, deleted every single character and every single piece of stored homebrew in the system, and redid the whole thing from scratch with no burden of preserving existing user content.

How do you feel about that notion?  You down?  Ready to wave sayonara to all your stuff and wait a couple of months for them to do a feature sprint for the General Features System sans all pre-existing user data?  Nah?  Yeah, didn't think so, me either.

They managed Tasha's Cauldron and alternative class features.  They'll get to General Features.  Eat your holiday ham and exercise patience.

What we're using, what's customer-facing from DDB, is the production environment. Every tech company worth their salt has a separate development environment and more than likely a testing environment separate from that. It's completely impossible to stay up an running 24/7/365 if every update has to be created directly in the production environment. Data integrity is not the issue, data gets duplicated between the environments as needed. Starting from scratch still is though. Lots of work and a massive investment. The only way to rush that is to throw massive amounts of money at it, and business-wise that's probably not smart. 

I can say that I'd be staunchly opposed, to the point of questioning whether the service deserved my support anymore.

Homebrew comes and homebrew goes, but as bizarre as it is?  I've got character sheets from old, dead games I still cherish.  They stand as records of fun times past, and let me revisit them in some small part from time to time.  I've currently got 71 characters in my collection; losing them all stands a very good chance of being a dealbreaker for me no matter how slick the improved system would end up being.

Heh, which is the whole point.  DDB cannot afford the horrendous backlash they'd get for blowing up everybody's stuff just to try and fix their shit.  They have to do it whilst preserving continuity of service, or their business sinks.  Nobody would ever trust them again if they purged everything that way, and they know it.

 There are plenty of instances, though, of software companies having to abandon earlier beloved versions of a platform due to obsolescence, and in some ways that's what's going on here. Eventually, they have to say 'sorry, we built this city our code using duplos, and we've made this new version out of legos, and we can't afford to keep buying both, we're gonna stop buying duplos.' I think enough of the service is text-based that the hosting size of a second server, with a coding facelift, might be a viable option. Let people migrate to the new platform on their own time, with the knowledge that new content is only going to be on New Shiny Server (or Greyhawk, for Fun Branding Purposes).

If this was a money-grinding-cash machine, it would and could be done, on a reasonable timeline.  The current system gets mirrored to a separate server and a dedicated team sets to work on the new engine.  Once it's running properly and doing what it should, a conversion of old data (Homebrew and Characters only, I would surmise) to the new gets hammered out.  Properly documenting and tracking the changes on those parts would make creating a conversion program/app/algorithm possible.  I see it done with other softwares, albeit commercial grade stuff that usually costs a few grand to buy then all too often another few hundred, or more, to update later on, part of which is conversion methods for existing content.

It's a costly and ambitious endeavor, and I don't believe DDB grinds out enough cash to warrant such an undertaking.  Which means, as some have said, it will remain on a back shelf getting some attention when the team has time, which under the new content rollout schedule from Wizards, isn't looking like any time soon. 

I want to start off saying that I don't think theres a chance in hell of them wiping everything and starting from the ground up. however do you seriously think that if they did they wouldn't be able to allow you to transfer and convert your content from the old system to their new one. Seeing as how they'd be going in knowing that its something they would have to do.

Quote from animefreak701139 >>

I want to start off saying that I don't think theres a chance in hell of them wiping everything and starting from the ground up. however do you seriously think that if they did they wouldn't be able to allow you to transfer and convert your content from the old system to their new one. Seeing as how they'd be going in knowing that its something they would have to do.

 It depends on how difficult it would be to implement. Depending on what they change, it could be that it's not worth it in their estimation. Until [or, rather, if] it happens, you just can't know.

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

...see my post immediately above yours from two months ago.

if they could get this programmed and done in a week, they would.  They could absolutely shorten up the time, drastically...provided they wiped their database clean, deleted every single character and every single piece of stored homebrew in the system, and redid the whole thing from scratch with no burden of preserving existing user content.

How do you feel about that notion?  You down?  Ready to wave sayonara to all your stuff and wait a couple of months for them to do a feature sprint for the General Features System sans all pre-existing user data?  Nah?  Yeah, didn't think so, me either.

They managed Tasha's Cauldron and alternative class features.  They'll get to General Features.  Eat your holiday ham and exercise patience.

 Your point would be valid if it was only a week of griping but at this point it's been a year and books are being half implemented (i.e. Tashas and Theros) and we're being told that the "new" features system would make those Implementations easier.  So now we're waiting on their ghostware to accomodate their half implemented features that in some cases are over a year old if not longer.

It's a little less about patience because I believe their generic features was first mentioned in February.  So almost a year later and still no word, and still incomplete Implementations.  It should also be noted that nowhere on the site does DNDBeyond tell you that these books are half implemented leaving people to find that out AFTER purchase which is a shady business model.

It's not a matter of patience.. It's a matter of trust at this point.

Remember when we all thought this was a thing?

Quote from Nitelyfe81 >>

Remember when we all thought this was a thing?

 Remember when we actually had Dev updates on a regular basis

I'm disappointed this isn't done. Post-acquisition, they've been pretty silent about anything except marketing.

There's no way it's still in development. I've been on many a software engineering team, and multi-year features are exceedingly rare (I've never seen one). Business priorities shift way too fast.

My guess is they've shelved the project and moved everyone to work on the 3D VTT. That puppy will bring in microtransactions galore, and that's positive cash flow. Meanwhile, there aren't really any viable competitors to D&D Beyond, so building this General Feature feature is unlikely to have an impact on their bottom line. Engineers are expensive. You want to make sure they are working on things that will have a good return on investment.