Friday, April 6, 2012

MUL!!

The MUL is now 94% complete!  The rest are a few models of things scattered about.  Often units that were in an older record sheet book and not in the newer ones.  2% of those left represents about 80 of these situations.  I got rid of most of the duplicates, match up variants described with no model to ones with models, and identified a bunch of units missing from the official MUL.  Right now, excluding the stuff I list below, I have 4674 units.  There are another 672 that the canon MUL has that I don't, about half will be matched up as I finish the rest, many of the others don't have any sources in the canon MUL, so I may just skip them until more data is available.

There are 500 more units I still have to go through, these are:
205 Support Vehicles - mostly just cleanup
40 Buildings - mostly just cleanup
120 Dropships
17 Jumpships
2 Mobile Structures
24 Space Stations
92 Warships

I saved the more complicated units for last, as I needed to come up with a method to save crazy stuff like warship bays with 3 items in them, 2 of which have doors, but only 1 door type can launch, weapon bays with 4 weapon types, all with unique ammo.  Heck, I'm still not sure if I should track ammo in DS/JS/WS/SS by entire unit, or by bay (I have a question open on the official forums that hasn't been answered yet).  Mobile structures can get *really* complex, as I have to track 20 hexes, 20 turrets, dozens of item types, etc, etc.  Still tho, I can knock out all the rest in a couple days.

However, I have a *LOT* of cleanup to do.  Gotta make sure stuff is consistently inputted, clean up my excel file, go back through the hundred or so items I have marked as having some issue and see if I can find errata or a fix as to why it was a broken design, etc, etc.

I also want to go through and rip all the text out of heavy metal files (fluff stuff) and push it into this database (including credits if they were in there) and make a lot of the images that aren't on the canon MUL.

In the next week or two I'll make a website that'll let you peruse the data, as well as functionality to let you make a change to it to fix errors.  I won't have support yet to print out PDFs of lists of units, and may not end up ever allowing that support to be available to the public to avoid CGL loosing any sales.

2 comments:

  1. Bad Syntax,

    I have recently found and read your blog. I am incredibly interested in your software designs. I am an amateur game designer, which is to say I write games for myself that noone then goes on to play. I believe you and I have many things in common, like our fondness for rule-based, internally-consistent games and penchant for collecting miniatuers we will in all likelihood never use. Surprisingly enough, even our home lives have parallels in that I recently took extended time off from work and let my wife do all the wage earning by herself. Unfortunately for me though, I am now back in the work force.
    To get to the point, I am writing you in connection with the planet mapper you have developed and its resulting game design opportunities. I am an actuary and, while I have small experience with programming in such formats as Visual Basic, I lack your programming skill and often suffer in my game design as a result. On the flip side, I have read of your self-reported lack of creativity and feel I may have something I can offer to a mutually beneficial partnership.
    You have stated in your blog that you have considered abandoning the Canon and producing a BT-like game, but with a more internally-consistent design concerning certain of the supporting details. To quote your entry on April 3, 2011: "This will help me with what I have wanted to do since I started playing so many years ago. That is the ability to conquer the inner sphere, one soldier at a time, on my computer, hopefully against other humans somewhere else or at least decent AI." Specifically referencing the Inner Sphere aside, I would likewise love to design and play such a game.
    I cringe at the amount of time your blog implies you have spent learning and codifying the BT Canon. I think a much more valuable endeavor would be to use the BT game as a mechanical starting point, but to allow flexibility in such arenas as planet design and army composition. Even if Canon is met at a single time (a moving target at best), it will quickly deviate in any dynamic game setting anyway. Therefore, in my opinion, it is time much better spent to create a realistic starting point that can be dynamically moved forward in the context of planetary production, battle-driven attrition, and even (ambition willing) political AI algorithms.
    Hopefully, some aspect of such a partnership is interesting to you. If so, you can most easily reach me at jack@kellycruise.com. I hope to hear from you.
    Thanks for your time and your entertaining blog,
    Jack

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