Could be bugs, but... (TLDR)

(edit: just realized I posted this in the dnd channel and not in gen discussion, sorry it is in the wrong channel)

As a developer, I hate bugs (actually I love them, helps me be better, but it still stings), so I don't want to jump right in and say, "Hey this software is really buggy", especially when I have only been in it for a week now.

Some of it may also be, just how it is, and it just doesn't make sense to me till it is explained.

So, without further ado:

Character Generation:
Why is there not a place for player characters? Yeah, I get that I need to add the to creatures, but why? That's not intuitive.
Why are race and class treated as the same thing? Granted I'm playing dnd5 and I get other systems may handle class and race as the same thing (the original dnd did back in the 70's) but the major systems that this application supports do not handle it that way.

So, as the game master, I create the 'creatures' that will become the players, then I have to set those 'tokens' on a map and as my players connect I assign them the correct creature that will be their character. Ok, I follow this logic. Now, since I am trying to come to this software from another vtt, my players already have characters. We are going to put those characters into the creatures I have on the map. My players, being the intuitive group that they are, jump right to it. (The race class thing threw us for a min, but we figured it out). They have now gone through and updated their 'sheets' to have their stats, and we learned that with just about every change they needed to send it to me for approval or things would not work. This is all fine. Then I go and look in the content library to check the 'creatures' and find that none of my players' hard work is there. If I right-click and go to edit on the context menu, I can see their changes, but not in the library. This seems like it should have been updating to the library since I was approving the changes. Instead, I had to right-click, go-to location, and save the 'creature' (this also is not intuitive and took a sec to find). This completely contradicts the documentation that is on the site on how to do this.
So is this the correct behavior or is it a bug?

When my players would upload their image token, at first it was fine, but then they all ended up with the same image. No this was not a joke they were playing on me, which is what I first thought, but it seems that when it was saved they would over right with the last as user.jpg or user.png. This does not seem right either, less it is a world of clones.

Since I had read in the forums someplace before that someone was having issues because they had too many duplicate spells and such in the rules library (and so did I) I decided to back up my player 'creatures' so I could reinstall everything and try to get only one instance of the players handbook and monster manual installed. When I go to the content library and try to export the creatures, on a couple of them I get an error "failed to export" So I look at the logs and find out that it is "failed to determine if id is encrypted".

Code:

java.lang.RuntimeException: Failed to determine if id [546] is encrypted.
    at com.mindgene.res.server.ServerCategory.isEncrypted(ServerCategory.java:1367)
    at com.mindgene.res.server.RESServerImpl.exportCategoryEntitiesToDirectory(RESServerImpl.java:553)
    at com.mindgene.d20.dm.console.ExportSelectedTask.exportSelectedToGlavBall(ExportSelectedTask.java:192)
    at com.mindgene.d20.dm.console.ExportSelectedTask.exportToFile(ExportSelectedTask.java:156)
    at com.mindgene.d20.dm.console.ExportSelectedTask.work(ExportSelectedTask.java:118)
    at com.mindgene.d20.laf.BlockerControl.run(BlockerControl.java:224)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:748)
    at com.mindgene.common.threading.SafeThread.safeRun(SafeThread.java:187)
    at com.mindgene.common.threading.SafeThread.run(SafeThread.java:195)

SPELLS:
One of my players has a bunch of spells from the "Book of lost spells", so I decided to go ahead and try to load those in. I fork a spell from the PHB, update the description, update the flow (BTW this is a super cool way to do this), make sure it has a check, highlight it, and hit enable. Expected behavior (words taken directly from my QA team) is that the spell would show up in the spell list for the player 'creature'. Instead, the spells only appear in the rules library and nowhere else. Oh, and I did try to create a spell from scratch not a fork from the PHB and had the same results.
If this is not how I'm supposed to create a spell, is there better documentation?

There have been a few other issues, connections and such, but I read in another post that a lot of those should be fixed in the next release. Which btw, what is the release schedule?

Anyways, I really want to love this software, it has a lot of really really nice features over the other two VTTs that I have used. When I get a more solid understanding of it all I would love to put together some vid tutes on how to set up for new players and maybe even write some extensions or add ons.

Anyways, if you made it this far, give yourself 100xp

Thanks in advance,
Kevin

 

Awesome, Thanks! That explains a lot and makes things feel more fluid. Also lets me explain to my players why things are how they are.

I appreciate your time to explain these things to me.