Saturday, April 28, 2012

Battletech Encyclopedia

I've spent most of my BT time the last week working on creating recordsheets and cleaning up the "Battletech Encyclopedia", which I think will be the new name of my version of the "Master Unit List".  I currently have mech record sheets *mostly* working.  Connector lines aren't showing yet (a ... is a continued piece of equipment) and I need to work on addon equipment (Artemis, Apollo, Capacitor, Insulator, One-shot, MG Array, stuff like that) but its darned close.  See what I've been doing on that at http://goodsects.ddns.net/bte.  I used hexes instead of circles to make my record sheets different than canon ones so people will instantly know I didn't just scan stuff in ;)  All mine are dynamically generated (and cached, so the first load is the slowest).  I also cleaned up a bit of how other mech data was displayed, and added about 900 new images.  You should be able to use the Encyclopedia to print out recordsheets for most of the 3025 mechs at this point, and many of the other ones.

I'll update the site at http://goodsects.ddns.net/bte a lot more often than I will the blog, so just because I didn't update the blog, doesn't mean I wasn't doing lots of work on the record sheets.

After mechs I'll do combat vehicles, battle armor, infantry, protomechs, support vehicles, dropships, warships/jumpship/stations, and then mobile structures.  I'll probably stick to that order unless the couple of viewers out there decide they want something else faster and let me know.

I am still thinking about the idea of making this into a system that lets you track unit status in games.  Basically I'll make a simple web page that lets you apply damage, see stats, show the enemy the unit stats, etc, etc, so you could use this site on a phone, tablet, or laptop to help track your game.  Of course I'll have die rollers, and probably even automatically resolve damage between 2 units.  You'll have teams, and you and your opponent(s) can all sign in and play against each other, save the game and continue later, show little animations of armor damage after the game is over, and possible I'll even expand it to support doing repairs.  Still just thinking about it at this point, I don't play BT and couldn't use the tool much myself, so its all about what you viewers (or people you can get to become viewers, hint hint) say you want me to work on.

I thrive on feedback and input, and without it I tend to jump around between projects a lot and don't have a lot of direction.  Not many people read this blog so if you have any ideas to get more people interested in what I'm doing I'm all ears.

1 comment:

  1. I look at things. Keep up the good work! I am interested mainly in the planet operations stuff. So I am gathering info here and there and will be sending you some questions about your ruleset soon. Thanks!

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