Sometime next week http://www.shadowrunrpg.com/wordpress/?p=59

not really suprised, although disssapointed. But now we get a combat mage!

I´m actually surprised. This is not lots of people involved, buisness decisions and unforseen complications. It´s just Adam not being able to finnish when he said he would. I´m not mad, just... thought this if anything would be on time.

well, it was kind of out of the blue that they said Wednesday.. then Thursday... so sounds like they thought he could get it done in time, and just wasn't able to finish. Probably had to pack sometime. No worries, it'll just give Ellery more time to pick it apart. Hopefully they'll keep posting more pregen chars

As all people who wait for 6 months, I'm very disappointed about that new delay

Why didn't he make the PDF before yesterday??? he tells us yesterday "What? SR4 PDF is due today?" for me it's unacceptable for a professional -> I imagine the face of my boss if I tell him the same about the software I develop "What ? it's due today?" I will get fired!

If I dont make mistake, it's Adam who makes the FAQ so why did he put a date for the pdf release if he won't make it!!! He don't finish the pdf but go to gencon to celebrate the SR4 release??? that's really amazing and disrespectful for all the people that can't go to Gencon and wait for the pdf for 6 months... is Adam the only guy that can make some layout at Fanpro??? isn't it possible to take a laptop and finish it at gencon? or may be it's not just a layout problem...

waiting another week for the PDF release is really a bad news (I will sleep badly for another 7 days ) and publishing an SR4 archetype each day will not help much

Sometimes shit happens. Looks like he ended up with too many tasks to do before jumping the plane to GenCon. Keep in mind that Edmonton to Indy isn't a short flight. Without really looking into it i'll take a guess at 6 hrs. total including at least one transfer. And flight time choices are probably somewhat limited.

Frankly i was initially very surprised by the intended Wed. release, available before you could buy it any other way. Way beyond what i expected, which truthfully was second business day after Gencon at the earliest.

"What? SR4 PDF is due today?" I think Adam was joking a bit there. Maybe he shouldn't have been, but welcome to dealing with a small business where someone can have a huge number of hats that can interfere with each other. I see his biggest mistake here as committing to something that i don't think he needed to, PDF on sale before Gencon. It has led to my disappointment as well as others here.

But i'll temper my judgement on that by at least giving him credit for taking a shot at it. *shrug*

My guess is that the technical problems with producing a good eBook were a lot harder to solve than Adam realized. The pages with the green borders are huge and load incredibly slowly--some of the worst PDF encoding I've ever seen, though it looks nice. The character sheets are a decent size, but look like complete junk.

When stuff like this happens, jobs that should take a couple hours can take days, not counting the trip to the hair specialist to replace what you've torn out.

Besides a number of other Fanpro people also being tied up at Gencon, since Adam has already started the job it is likely for the best that he finish it.

Small businesses have to honor their deadlines, too. And while I'm acutely aware of how delightful a crunch time is (programming sense, not publishing)--that doesn't excuse it.

make images lowres and text highres. The previews are either all high or all low.

I'd almost argue that for most small business doing what you said you'd do is more important than a big company saying they'd do something and not doing it. However, this is a different case because most of us here on dumpshock are kinda stuck anyway because we are the diehard fans so it doesn't matter if they disappoint us by not fulfilling their deadlines. The scary part is all the new players who were interested who may now loose interest as a result. But that is just my (self-proclaimed expert opinion with pieces of paper to back it up) opinion.

Well, creating enough nested bookmarks to match the TOC would take a moderately experienced bookmark-maker 8-10 hours, minimum. I'd wager it would take even longer. I mean, sure, you could let a program do it for you, but you still have to nest everything yourself assuming the bookmarks are all correct from importing.

On top of that, it's boring and tedious and usually requires a couple of breaks. I can easily see how that alone took a day. Besides, if you look at the NA map or the two character sheets, they were saved from JPEGs (which makes them load slower than much larger text-heavy PDFs). I'd have just put the JPEGs up, but that's me. Depending on how he created the layout and resolved it with the other layout designers, the book could be in multiple file formats, which just makes it even more difficult to merge into one cohesive PDF.

Plus on top of that, he's trying to optimize the size. I mean, I got the Loose Alliances PDF from BattleCorps and it was 4 MB, which is still kind of small for a book that long with images and two full-color covers plus bookmarks set at an 8"x11.5" resolution (probably the same size as the actual files for printing) and the resolution was kind of lacking with the embedded images. Fourth Edition is probably going to be closer to 20MB and while small is nice, it really helps to have a good resolution for it to really be worth it. Plus IIRC, he said the green borders are ubiquitous, which already messes with the size and resolution compared to just black text on a white background (or the arrow images for comments).

I wouldn´t buy a pdf of a game I never played before. Very few will likely get the pdf of the core book and then not get the hardcopy, and people who never played the game before will likely not be waiting hard enough to get the pdf on release day just to be able to read it asap. Most new players will probably get the game when it hits the shelves.

But if someone unfamiliar with the game saw the news of the pdf and the release date, then looked for it and couldn´t find it, that would give a bad impression even if it´s unlikely the person would actually buy it.

I'm not buying the hardcopy.

Also, SLJames--eight to ten hours is a little excessive...six hours or so would be more along the lines I'm thinking of for a doc of that size. Though you are very, very right about the mind-numbing boredom it incurs. The programs that do it have gotten a *lot* better over the past couple years, too.

As for size optimization, though--to hell with that, I want my bloody PDF! I've got broadband and pretty much everyone else who'd buy the PDF probably does too. Twenty megabytes? Thirty? Forty? Not much time at all. If you're still narrowband in this day and age, you're screwed anyway.

What's that? A Shadowrun product that's behind schedule!

Say it ain't so!

Celebration was in order and well-deserved--I'm sure you've all put in a lot of hard work, and you've come up with a product, and that's worthy of celebration.

Plus, I was really surprised that the PDF was supposed to be released before GenCon. It would have kind of stolen the thunder from the conference goers. ("Well, I could stand in line and not get a book, or I could order the PDF. Why did I come here again? Oh, right, to hang out with WotC people and buy their stuff.")

Still, being on time is a virtue.

I'm still with Ellery. Trying to get the pdf out the same DAY as Gencon is commendable. Adam just forgot his cape and spandex pants at home, is all.

It's just that I dont understand one thing:
Why not using a nice little program from the start on? So you can add your Index from the beginning?
You dont need to add them later ...
With a nice program you *just * have to relayout - what shouldnt take that long considering a nice program (but I'm repeating myself here a bit )
Okay, I understand this hadn't been done with those book earlier than the first ebook .. But nowadays?
Ah, whatever

Why is it that people almost allways seem to think and say

- HEY, YO, SALESMAN! Me wanna to buy so MOVE!

If FP-US had done it in time, it would have been nice and good, granted. If there is a delay, by whatever reason its up to them. Its there brand/ game after all, well, or license, whatever.

Anyway, as a great software corp once historically declared:

It's done, when its done, no earlier, but no later.

So, stay cool, it WILL be available, I am very sure about that.

Other than that, gawddarnit, why is it not up already? MOVE, SALESMAN, MOVE!



regards
Daniel

Apart from the unlucky announcement ...
I am looking forward to Shadowrun 4th ed since it was first announced. Having checked srrpg.com every day for news, scaned whatever I found - I finally cant stand it anymore and just want to have this book and read it - I even got me some vacation myself so I would have the time to read it as soon as the pdf has been announced...
(And please dont tell me I should have come to gencon. Its a (one way) 16h trip from my place (not to the con but to the city ... I'm living in Europe ... Not to mention the costs )

That's 6 weeks in the future! argh! Guess the english version of the BBB will be available a lttle sooner. And reminding of the last horribly translated books, i'll buy the english one.

Anyway, so the project is done. I have in just over 12 man hours done a better job than Adam did, and I did it on-time and under budget.

I even decided to keep the color plates for the inside cover and sample characters so it's now a ginormous 52.4 MB. It loads quickly. It prints. It's just plain better in every conceivable way (and like I said, Reader 7's search function is more of an annoyance and impediment that in any way useful).

They should just use my version as the fixed version.

I would never buy a PDF that I couldn't Copy/Paste from or Search from. Yours may be easy to print, but it lacks the main quality that I seek when I want a PDF, that of searchable, highlightable, and copyable text.

Just to keep your ego in check, bub. *cheesy grin*

You do have to admit, you're working with a simplified version. Updating its contents to reflect errata is probably impossible. Still, I like yours better than my original, at the moment. It loads in the neighborhood of 10-30 times faster (under one second per page versus 5-15, and my machine is beefy), has correct bookmarks (some of the base version's bookmarks lead to points a page or two inside the chapter), and seems to print just fine (base version caused the campus print queue to commit suicide and take all pending documents on that printer with it).

The original version was pretty much unusable due to the slow render-time of each page, outside of a printed format. It was also unprintable. This version is usable and printable, hence I deem it superior on the fronts that matter. Being able to search for text is nifty, but if you can't flip through it or even print a hardcopy for manual pageflipping, it's a hollow feature.

What was the process that you put it through, James, from start to finish? The guys at FanPro might consider keeping a heinous and unusuable (but editable) reference copy around and then somehow automating your process to create actual usable (but static) copies for distribution from the nonstatic-but-nonusable reference.

My budget was $0. This was a labor of frustration. My rate for compensation, however, is not even close to $0. The last time I had an hourly rate, it was $200/hr.

I opened the file in Reader 7. I copied each page, pasted it in a new file in Photoshop 7, converted to grayscale (except for the covers, and I have both color and B&W for the inside cover and sample characters), saved as PNGs, opened Acrobat Pro 6. Created a PDF from each grouping of PNGs (done by chapter), saved as individual chapters, then created a PDF from the collection of chapter PDFs plus PNGs of the front and back covers.

That took 4 hours.

It took me 8 to bookmark the whole thing. I also add font decoration to identify chapter, subchapter, etc. for when you get pretty well nested (such as in The Wireless World or Skills). I then saved the file.

Wireknight was helpful enough to make suggestions, and so he's seen the final product. I plan to print it out at school tomorrow when no one's around.

Damn, I wish I had photoshop so I could do that with my copy.

OBTW, my version is also more deeply bookmarked than Fanpro's which is probably why it took me so long.