Need Input

I need some input to determine which direction I continue with.

Forum poll here
Please go vote, it can change the future of my site!

Until then, I finished inputting 3145, and here are the Tripod Superheavies to prove it!  Granted, things like TSEMP I am not sure how to implement yet as we have no rules :(

Mechwarrior Online & Stuff

So I am a sucker for BattleTech stuff, and purchased the Legendary Founder's pack a long time ago for MechWarrior Online.  I played a few of the beta's, and it was terribly boring and horribly uncreative.  It didn't progress much, but I tried to do my part in the beta.  I purchased wacky configurations, went into games with no armor, and did all sorts of things to help them test the system.  11 months ago they sent an email saying no more resets.  It was still a very early Beta, but apparently I should have stopped beta-testing at that point.  I didn't, and blew all that cash I gave them on stupid shit to help their "beta".

End result, all the money I blew was for nothing, as they won't give it back, citing "technological" reasons for their immorality.

So, MechWarrior Online is dead to me.  Its a shitty game anyway.  The interface is bland, the game as uncreative as Angry Birds, the engine mediocre, and it is nothing like BattleTech anymore.  Heck, they even did the stupid crap some games do now, which basically rewards you against other players if you spend more time in the game.  If you jump into a MWO game now, against somebody who has blown 40 hours a week for a year (yes, people do that), you simply can't win against them.  They shoot faster, turn faster, cool down faster, and you have no hope.  Adding cool skins sure, maybe neato looking effects, hell I'd be ok if playing more got you a higher resolution tree mesh.  But making your Awesome better than your opponents Awesome because you spent 500 hours of your life in it, and they spent 5, is just idiotic.

And unfortunately, MechWarrior Tactics blows too.  Browser based games always do :(

Now, off my soapbox.  I've been doing a huge amount of work with Alpha Strike conversions, well, and many other things that don't apply to Alpha Strike.  Just about every unit will produce a card, though many still aren't right.  Today I fixed the HT ability, added support for the new CR/CRW/RFA/RCA abilities, fixed PPC capacitors (which *reduce* your damage in Alpha Strike, seriously!), fixed long range damage calculation to no longer look at only short range weapons (which is so barely even a change, as hardly any weapons shoot to only SR anyway), added the IF ability, fixed Hardened/Ferro-Lamellor armor, added MML to the LRM and SRM factors, oh heck, I just made a butt-load of changes.

I am randomly picking units, and fixing everything on them I see broken.  If you want to help out, go randomly pick stuff (or let me know if you want a random unit feature like the MUL has) and let me know what you see broken, or different than the canon MUL!

The following I *know* have issues:

• Infantry that were NOT in the 3085 books.  I don't know the primary/secondary weapon types and counts.  Eventually I'll try to reverse engineer them.  Plus, I am not looking up the infantry armor type yet, so if it has special abilities and a damage divisor the stats will be wrong. I am also including field guns in the standard attack, like ALL other units.  Not sure if that is bad or not.
• Buildings and Mobile Structures do not support multiple hexes yet.  Well, they do, but not on the record sheet.  So only a third of their boxes show up.
• I need to re-input the items on most vehicles, large support vehicles, and structures.  Most are probably ok, but some may have items off.
• I am not automatically calculating BV yet, so if there is no PV in the MUL or when the unit was published, it is probably 0.
• I am not multiplying speeds by 2 yet.  Not sure why, maybe because its so easy :)
• No coolant pod support yet, not a big deal.
• Right now everything is as canon as possible.  I have added support in code so you'll eventually be able to say "use Bad_Syntax' optimizations" or not, but for now its just canon.

I am working on some new cards.  All dynamic so you can define stuff (including the colors, to save toner, or identify factions).  I don't think they look great, but I can fit everything *except* the larger warships on it:

Notice the text is more courier new, that is all text is the exact same size (so a W and I use the same screen real estate).  This makes it uglier, but makes various things work a bit better (movement, attacks, etc).  This supports 2 attack types, with up to 4 arcs.  So a large support vehicle with a sub-capital laser *OR* a sub-capital missile can fit on there, but add another weapon and it breaks it (types are standard, CAP, SCAP, and MSL, plus 4 arcs for large support vehicles, 6 arcs for space stations, and 8 arcs for warships)..  The heat area would go away for units that don't track heat.  Point value/Tech Rating would go on there somehwere, hopefully the year in service too, but I don't know where.  I was thinking of merging the AP/SP into a single row and just making the SP darker.  I'd like more on there but the card is already very crowded.  Optimally, I'd have 1 card for every unit type, but my artistic ability and excessive need to show everything cripples that idea :(

Anyway, things are coming along.  I've also started prototyping a new point value calculator on the Forums!

Medal of Honor Recipients

/NOT BATTLETECH

While creating names for my Mech unit today, I went with Medal of Honor recipients.  If you are needing some names for your unit, how about using real heroes?  There are 3096 names (32 are duplicates) as of today, and here is a little EXE to download and run until your rosters are full:

Medal of Honor Name Generator

No frills, but it'll require .NET 4.5 so make sure you have it, if not, well, update your machine, if you are still having issues I'll downgrade the .NET requirement.

/BACK TO BATTLETECH

Fixed a lot more bugs today, just about every unit now should come up in the BattleTech Encyclopedia, though many will still be wrong.  Fixed some of the big ones I noticed yesterday while posting the teaser list.  

Here is a new teaser, which threw a dozen or so errors while creating... I'll get it fixed:

Need a comma before the ARTAIS-6, need better support for  up to 3 hexes on buildings, TP broke, need to shrink the name, no points, etc, etc... but almost :)

Lame Teaser

Since my last post was a lot of words, and very little pictures, this time I'll show pictures.  After an absolutely daunting amount of coding time this weekend (wife is sick), I am making significant progress getting everything working.  

Here are some examples of my not yet finished cards, but I think accurate data (please point out anything that isn't).  There is a lot missing from the Strategic Operations conversions, like what if I have a long tom on the rear of a vehicle, but more BV up front, does it become a worthless item?  

Anyway, here are a few ugly pics of a work in progress, of my totally dynamically created cards, with *no* optional rules of mine:

I think this one is a first.  I made stuff fit, but it got a bit small.  The Luftenburg has even more armor and I'll be making the card double up in size when the circles get too small to use.

I haven't implemented the IF ability yet...

Oooooo, scary.

One of the more complicated tanks, and kinda scary too :)

The mech I lost in 4 die rolls over the weekend.  Die roll 1, landed ok.  Die roll 2, missed with my charged HPPC.  Die roll 3, rolled '2' for my supercharger. Die roll 4, rolled '12' for criticals taking out 3 engine slots.  Quickest game ever!

My original favorite.

And the Royal SLDF version.

I think the points may be wrong on this one.  I kinda think that the armor/structure should be split by entities.  So, if you did 5 damage, you would kill 1 with 1 armor and 1 structure hit, while the other 3 was wasted as you focused on 1 target... I dunno.

An old favorite... this one looks good and may be right.  Oh, my point values will eventually include the tech rating beside them (so 18C or something in this case). This is so when you play games, you get a gist for just how advanced your force is.

The doors are wrong, I just fixed that code.  Looks like I shouldn't have the LRM/FLK in there either (that is an optional rule of mine).  Also gotta work on the fonts in the attack block, and figure out why ER isn't showing.  The 2nd attack is capital missile, it'll show a "MSL" after the bracket typically.  "DT" is damage threshold btw.

Again, doors not right, but check out how perfect the nose fit in the gap!

Many warships *do* work, though obviously some have FAR too much armor.  This one fit ok, though I'm not sure why I don't have TP defined, the doors/cargo are broke, and the attacks are a bit small.  The first attack I believe is capital, the second capital missile.

 And what happen when things go wrong, very very wrong.  The attacks are overlapping (and still not showing ER for some reason.. it *used* to work!).  The armor is just, well, too much at 2000 points.  The structure of 99 is even pushing it.  There is just no way to fit 2000+ points of armor on this little bitty card.  I'll be checking for this in the near future, and if the number is too high the height of the card will be doubled.  The extra room will be used for more armor/structure.  I *might* instead double its width, move the special up beside the top and middle blocks, and make the entire bottom row a big armor block.  The image will get a bit smaller and be placed up top to the left of the PV.  Lots to do to make the Leviathan II work, but it does create the card with only a couple minor errors (my bay door format is broken for pretty much all DS/WS/JS/SS and large SV right now, so I gotta redo those units).

Again, these are *NOT* finished yet.  I'm pretty sure the Jormungand is 100% right, as I was using it to test against the example in Strategic Operations (which was wrong, with no errata, ugh).  I have a lot of minor typo's to fix in my database to get more up and running, and a few sequencing thing.  If I can be productive again over the week, I may have a roughly 90% success rate by next weekend.

After stuff gets working I'll start working on allowing you to specify the skill of the crew, the environment your fighting in (so you get a different card for underwater battles, and another if there is high winds, high temp, high gravity, etc, etc).  Oh, and all the settings of the cards are configurable, so if your Davion and print your cards, you can make the back of blocks yellow.  You can add textures as a backdrop, change colors of *everything*.  I'm hoping the color cards can be fully supported with the right user settings.

I updated the Battletech Engineer site with this code, so know most stuff is broken right now.

Go post on the forum!

Pieces Coming Together

I haven't been updating the blog as much lately, instead focusing on my far easier to use, and easier for ya'll to reply to, forum at http://battletechengineer.com, however, since not many folks are posting there, nor creating accounts to download the latest versions of various apps, I figured I'd throw out a blog posting for the few of you left reading it :)

Well the forum is up an operational.  The original black theme I had the highlighting was screwed up, and polls didn't work.  I reverted back to the default, but it was ugly as American politics.  So I found another more black one, made a little header, and left it at that.  I kinda wanted to move towards the color theme I have on the color Quick Strike cards, but, well, its a pain and I've been spending time on other things.  If anybody knows how to skin phpBB and wants to take it on, be my guest!

As for the other things.  I've been working on the BattleTech Engineer site, quite extensively.  Not many huge code changes, but a lot of minor bug fixes.  See, the way I've been designing things from the start was in a modular manner.  This means I tried to avoid hard-coding anything, created equipment and chassis tables with hundreds of variables, and essentially created a format that would be versatile enough to not require much work when things like superheavy mechs come out.  In many cases, new equipment can come out and I make a simple change in an excel file, run a script, and the application handles it from then on out.

Another thing this modular system allows me to do, that *nothing* else out there does, is design every single type of equipment with almost the exact same code.  For example, I made mechs work first with the Alpha Strike cards.  It took me under 30 minutes to get Aerospace and Conventional Fighters implemented.  It took a couple hours to get Dropships *nearly* done.  In fact, with just a few more days of good programming strides like today, and I'll be able to design, validate, and create record sheets and Alpha Strike cards for *everything* in the BattleTech universe.  I will be the first to get a mobile structure generator out there, the first to programatically determine things like warship factors in Alpha Strike, the first to let you build a city with unique buildings, and the first fully functional support vehicle creators (excluding excel, which is NOT fully functional).

Right now however, the site is an eye sore.  Its ugly as sin, and full of bugs.  I *am* working on it, but the aesthetics are low on my priority list.  For example, many dropships now work and you can see the Alpha Strike cards, in both color and black and white.  BUT, they have screwed up text (the abilities are most of what is screwed up right now).  When I finish the back end code I'll be changing the way I'm doing the Alpha Strike cards.  

Speaking of Alpha Strike, I am going to stop using the canon templates as I find them extremely non-functional with a lot of wasted space (do you *really* need to see "ALPHA STRIKE STATS" in big letters on them while movement is shrunk to tiny text?).  I have been creating a new card drawing system, about 95% done, that no longer uses a big file template.  Instead the entire card is rendered from nothing.  It resizes blocks and scales all the stuff so things can fit.  For example, a dropship can have a capital, sub-capital, standard, and capital-missile S/M/L/E values.  There is simply no way to do that on current cards, not to mention armor points.  My new system will increase the height of the attack block, remove the heat block, and add armor rows as necessary.  This method will actually work with all but the most powerful warships, and I'll be working on a way to programatically create those too.

Oh, and all that garbage underneath the Alpha Strike cards on the Battletech Engineer site is unformatted debug like data.  Eventually it'll show every calculation step on how the final tech ratings, battle value, cost, earliest date, date extinct, date of reintroduction, rules level, cost, all the Alpha Strike data, and the 4 availability ratings (yes, there are 4 now) are determined.  The record sheets may or may not work, they used to work, but I haven't double checked them.  If they look ok (no blanks, missing stuff, etc), they are probably right still.

And a surprise for those of you who have read this far.  If I can get a few people to say they want it, I'll finish another project I started.  This project is a web based Alpha Strike game play assistant.  Basically, create a game, select the armies and players, and then everybody can sign in on their tablets and/or phones and play against each other.  Well, they still have maps and miniatures, but it'll let you track damage, crits, hidden stats, etc with Alpha Strike cards.  This is a preliminary design to test out how I'll be doing it for full blown record sheets later.

Please go post stuff on the forum.  The more people are showing activity around what I'm doing, the more productive and less distracted I'll be towards these projects.  Plus, it'll give you a head start when I start my "he who contributes the most on my forum gets a company of miniatures in the mail" contest ;)

The Most ____ Mech Ever!

So I was playing around when I should have been coding, and came up with some interesting designs.

First, the most complicated mech you can ever see within Alpha Strike, the AS-01 Alpha Strike!  It isn't a good design, but it essentially tries to get the most capabilities in Alpha Strike as it can.  Here is the lowdown:
100 Ton Clan (Mixed) OmniMech
Endo-Steel Chassis
200 Compact Fusion Engine
1 Jump Jet
Compact Gyro
Small Cockpit

17 Tons Standard Armor

26 Compact Heat Sinks (16 internal to engine, other 10 use 5 slots)

Laser Anti-Missile System (Armored)

BattleMech HarJel (1 slot)

Small Shield

Triple-Strength Myomers

Retractable Blade

Remote Sensor Dispenser

AEP

ECM

TAG

C3S

CASE (since its an Omni)

HAG20 w/12 Shots

Twin LAC5 w/20 Shots total

Twin SRM4 w/25 Shots total

Twin LRT10 w/24 Shots total, mounted in a turret in the right shoulder

Carries a 10 ton hand-held weapon (LRM20 w/12 shots, Narc with 6 shots)

I don't know the BV/Cost, it wasn't very pertinent to what I was attempting.  I am *pretty* sure its a legal design, but may have screwed something up.  Its darned close surely.

And now its insane Alpha Strike card, check out that ability count!:

And the next mech, a whopping 200 tonner, with 75 tons of hardened armor.  I created this one to test just how durable a design could be.  I envision it very slowly heading towards a very heavily defended position.  It has a turret in each torso that hold twin ERPPCs, and 3 micro-pulse lasers scattered about for anti-infantry work.  Its also got Angel ECM, AEP, and TAG, plus a whopping 40 double heat sinks.  Here is its card:

This next one is stupid and munchy, but I wanted to see just how hard a unit would be to hit.  This 15 ton mech has a speed of 18/27 with 1 jump.  It has ZERO points of armor, an XXL engine, Endo-Steel Structure, and an XL Gyro.  It also has Null-Signature System and Chameleon Light Polarization shield.  Its weaponry consists of a single gun... you know it, the Clan ER Large Laser!  In BattleTech this would be +2 to hit at medium range, and +4 at long, as the NSS/LPS are cumulative.  However that doesn't appear to be the case in Alpha Strike, so it kinda gets screwed.  But anyway, based on the movement it is +5 to hit, another +1 for being jump capable, so for SR/MR/LR to hit it is a +5/+6/+7.  Its one structure means if it gets hit it does, but it can harass a slower force from a distance with near impunity.

And lastly for tonight, a uber-munchy Manei-Domini Platoon.  This sucker eats mechs for breakfast.  The platoon of 30 soldiers has a whopping 1563 BV, speed of 3, range 2 AEP, acts as a C3I node, takes -1d6 burst fire damage, doesn't take double damage in the open, and half damage from flame based attacks.  It also has FIVE field guns (AC/2).  In a point blank attack it could do up to 66 damage, or 7 in Alpha Strike.  Unfortunately Alpha Strike doesn't support that, so its damage is only 5, but I gave it MEL to compensate. Actually Strategic Operations and Alpha Strike showed some questions with this unit.  For example what do you do with enhanced point blank attacks?  What about all the special abilities various prosthetics can give, and how do you deal with field guns and can they use special ammo? However you look at it though, it is simply a brutal platoon, see for yourself (notice its skill is 2, not 4)!  Disclaimer:  This design doesn't include any errata from anywhere.

I'll tinker with more later, but I really need to get coding to finish up the automated way of doing it.  Nobody has complained about the BTE site being down yet, but hopefully lots of people miss it.

I've been dragging ass lately for a couple reasons.  Thoughts of my dad and cat keep me from being as productive as usual.  I'm going to see some folks play BattleTech tomorrow, hopefully I end up joining in and like them and it can break me out of my rut.  If not I may try somewhere else.

Not many posts on my forum, well, 1 in fact.  A dozen registered users.  Kinda was hoping for more activity.  I'll start doing releases there to make people get involved and hope for the best :)

Plus, soon, I'll give away *companies* of miniatures to folks that post the most *good* messages ;)

Forum Up!

Ok, I think its ready enough.  Probably be a few learning curves, mostly in regards to security and organization, but the forum is up and running (well, it seems to be, let me know if you can't get it working).  

http://battletechengineer.com

I'm thinking of giving away miniatures to help get people to start posting there.  Not sure how I'll do it yet, maybe each post (or thread popularity) is basically a lottery ticket, and each week I'll randomly determine a winner who receives a miniature, or a lance.  At least until I either get some steady activity, or, well, don't have enough posts to justify the work :)

At 100 posts, I'll start the miniature and book giveaway.

Feedback is appreciated!

I'd like to thank my buddy (who's name will stay anonymous) for hooking me up with the server and hosting on his network.

I look forward to seeing you there.  Once it starts getting used more, activity on the blog will die off.  The forum will be where I launch my new utilities (including the 4X type Succession Wars game!) and products for BattleTech, as well as my own similar game system, and maybe some other games.