Well, if there's a CVA, then it wouldn't hurt to do that too.

The tricky part is deciding on the right implementation. If the client knew what sort of fighters the carrier had, that would be one thing, but there are a huge number of possible configurations, even for carriers within a particular race. Some ships can carry multiple types of fighters (even at the same time, such as Orions), may or may not have a MRS or SWAC, etc. So it has to be done manually at scenario setup time. The exact method is not important as long as the type of configuration doesn't change during the scenario.

The main thing that needs to be added is ready racks. Even if they are just a record-keeping form with no real functionality, there really needs to be the ability to record ammo as being in the ready rack. Now there are only two places for drones to be (in storage or on a fighter).

Ideally, there would be a ready rack box for each shuttle box on the ship; it might work sort of like the load scatterpack option, so you could just load drones into it. Then some other control (maybe within the ready rack, or somewhere else; doesn't really matter) could transfer drones onto the fighter. An optional feature would be to load drones directly onto the fighter (the Kzinti Weightlifting Team rule) without going through the ready rack, but this could be worked around manually by just going through the ready rack at the time. I don't see any need to enforce any type of capacity or whatever on the rack. This would create a large data problem and players can just be responsible for making sure their racks are used legally.

This could reasonably easily be extended to support fighters with energy-based weapons as well; instead of loading a drone onto the ready rack, you would load some sort of charge into the ready rack, except that it wouldn't need to come frome drone storage. I don't see the need for any particular link to EA - as long as there is somewhere on the EA form for fighter-weapon recharge power to go, the player can take care of assigning it to the right sort of weapon. However, if actions taken regarding ready racks were automatically entered in the log (for the owning player only obviously) that might be convenient.

Some weapons (drones) require only ammo, others (photons, fusion, whatever) require only energy, and some (plasma-D) require both. The only thing that absolutely must be tracked is ammo (since there is no other way to do it) but a feature that accounts for all three types of weapons would be the best.

Allowing pods to be loaded into the ready rack as well would be nice; although pods aren't often loaded and unloaded during a scenario, I don't see any reason to actually leave this feature out, since from the standpoint of the client a pod is just another type of ammo. (Some pods, such as the phaser pod, also have a charged/discharged status like plasma-D).

By William T Wilson (Sheap) on Monday, April 24, 2006 - 05:15 pm: Edit

As far as drone types:
Try playing a scenario set in a time period where the standard drone is speed-8, but type-II and type-V drones are available, and also speed-20 drones are available as commander's options.
You might find yourself with 20 different types of drones just in that one scenario. For extra insanity, maybe there's a carrier. (I actually played this scenario against Lessss).

By Gary Bear (Gunner) on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - 02:00 pm: Edit

In thinking about improvements to make handling/using drones easier in SFBOnline, I think the first area to address is the drone construction. This piece should be able to implement independantly of what gets done it terms of rack loading, fighters, etc.

The current process is cumbersome in that players have to construct the drones and then the picking process is difficult due to them being listed in the order created and the abbreviations making it obscure to pick the correct drones.

So here's my proposal:

1. SFBOnline to have all the possible drones combinations pre-configured. This will cut out having to build them and let them be more logically pre-sorted.

2. Change the selection box when filling the drone racks for these pre-configured drones.
A. A selection dropdown with YEAR in it to show only the drones available for the "Year" in which the battle is being set.
B. A selection for drone size.

Are we allowed to show BPV and G/R/L Availability Numbers or is that stepping over the line of what SFBOnline is allowed to provide?

I'm willing to do this data setup of all possible drone configurations if Paul can tell me what format the CSV file should be in so the client can interpret it.

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - 02:49 pm: Edit

The format of the library file is:

Name=Type-,speed module,module1,module2,etc.

For example,
Standard (Medium)=Type-I,M,x
Heavy Drone (Medium)=Type-IV,M,X
Standard (Fast)=Type-I,F,x
Heavy Drone (Fast)=Type-IV,F,X

BTW, where would should be YEAR for the drone selection be? BTW, I do not plan on trying to enforce the Availability rules.

I can probably implement the BPV so that you can see you can how much the drones cost in each drone rack. I just need to add the data for how much each of the components cost.

By Gary Bear (Gunner) on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - 03:02 pm: Edit

I would see the YEAR being used just as a sort criteria to get the list down to a manageable amount.

After all, if it's Y175, why make the list three times as long by including SLOW-speed (long obsolete) and FAST-speed (not yet available) drone combinations?

By Peter Thoenen (Eol) on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - 03:07 pm: Edit

How about make the "Enforce Year availability" toggable. That way if I only want to see ones availablein my year I can as opposed to see ALL possible combinations in Y150.

Sort of like how you do with the library, maybe a drop down. Default "All" and then drop downs with each year a new drone combo became available (which also displays all previous years).

By Gary Bear (Gunner) on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - 03:07 pm: Edit

---

Quote:

I can probably implement the BPV so that you can see you can how much the drones cost in each drone rack. I just need to add the data for how much each of the components cost.

---

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - 03:18 pm: Edit

I agree it would be nice to limit the drones per year.

Question: Is where do we set the Year? Should it be on the Expendables tab? Should you be required to set it in "Game Information" type thing which could be linked into the ship selection stuff too?

Since GRL is based on Year and the Race of the ship. I will need to add table of GRL for each race.

By Gary Bear (Gunner) on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - 04:17 pm: Edit

It would probably be easier (for the Players) to set it once and have it be global for all ships, but I have no idea where to do that in the client.

The EXPENDABLES tab is probably the place to do it as it shouldn't ever matter except when selecting drones.

By Gary Bear (Gunner) on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - 04:24 pm: Edit

When displaying by YEAR, the data file would have to have a lower and upper limit for a record to be shown.

For example:
(Drone),(Gen Spaces),(Rest Spaces),(Lim Spaces),(Start Year),(End Year),(BPV)

Type-I-Medium,0,0,1,165,165,0.5
Type-I-Medium,0,1,0,166,166,0.5
Type-I-Medium,1,0,0,167,179,0.5
Type-I-Fast,0,0,1,178,178,1.0
Type-I-Fast,0,1,0,179,179,1.0
Type-I-Fast,1,0,0,180,225,1.0

By Peter Thoenen (Eol) on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - 04:37 pm: Edit

Gary: I can live with that.

Paul: How about we don't make it race specific like you suggest and leave that for the player simple to cut down the difficulty of doing this.

Gary / Paul:

If you reallly want you can do:

Type-I-Medium,Stonefish,0,0,1,165,170,0.5,Klink
Type-I-Medium,Stonefish,0,0,1,166,170,0.5,All

NOTE: I don't think Gary has a prob makes a couple thousand CVS file WITH every possible race / year / drone payload combination, I think the concern is how do we organize it.

The nice thing about introducing a "race" and "year" flag is we could eventually apply it to the ships also (just show me all ships by this race in this year)

By Gary Bear (Gunner) on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - 04:45 pm: Edit

I was also thinking that the record might need Race since some avail year and percentages differ (like Type-III-ECM is "R" for Klingons but "L" for everyone else).

As Peter said, I don't have a problem with doing a record for each possible drone combination for each race. Most would just be a COPY ALL, PASTE, and then Replace "Klingon" with "Kzinti" for the copied records and then tweak the 2 or 3 that are different.

I'm not trying to make this too complicated, so Paul has to say where things are "close enough" vs. the amount of work to enable. Like an X-Flag so only X-Ships can get X-Drones. That can either be controlled by the flag or not support an X-flag and just trust players to only put X-Drones on X-Ships.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - 06:31 pm: Edit

I'd like a pre-defined drone_long_name column as long as we are making changes. By long I still mean abreviated, but with abreviations that I can decipher like those Gary has been working on.

G/R/L can be noted in the data, but its probably more work than its worth trying to have the client 'validate' the selection.

It would seem to me that it would be possible to have speed as a seperate selection. Each drone would default to GA for the year selected but you could change it to a slower speed if you like. This could cut down the list by 3x or more if speed-12 is allowed.

I don't think a running total of BPV would be that hard to arange so I'll add that request Speed upgrade cost being seperate from CO enhancement cost.

I would assume (for simplicity) all drone costs factor the trade in value of 1-2 I-S drones.

By Gary Bear (Gunner) on Wednesday, April 18, 2007 - 11:51 am: Edit

Paul,

You said the library file format is:

---

Quote:

Name=Type-,speed module,module1,module2,etc.

For example,
Standard (Medium)=Type-I,M,x
Heavy Drone (Medium)=Type-IV,M,X
Standard (Fast)=Type-I,F,x
Heavy Drone (Fast)=Type-IV,F,X

---

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Wednesday, April 18, 2007 - 12:46 pm: Edit

Gary,
Yes. Sorry I forgot to correct the post. The BBS removed my pseudo tag. And yes M is my key for speed.

Also, remember the External Armor modules.

By Gary Bear (Gunner) on Wednesday, April 18, 2007 - 01:40 pm: Edit

ugh.

Would it just be easier, since I'm fully configuring each drone, to just change it to be "Drone Speed" (20, 24, 32, etc.) and have you read the speed value rather than having to calculate it using the letter code and adjust for external armor?

If this is too much of a pain, how do you want Moderate Speed (12) to be indicated?

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Wednesday, April 18, 2007 - 02:59 pm: Edit

Gary,
If you want specify the speed as M-20,F-32,F-24,etc to specify a particular speed to not have to worry about the calculation for external armor and it won't require that much code to be changed.

Paul Franz

By Geoff Conn (Talonz) on Friday, April 20, 2007 - 01:24 pm: Edit

Why arent some standard drones already in the ammo list, instead of having players tell the client every dang time what IM and IVM is?? edit: ok the ADD does this, why not standard racks?

Why cant we have 'blank' as an option in the rackspace pulldown menu, so that we can change our mind when loading it without having to clear the whole rack and start over?

Scatterpack loadout interface is driving me crazy, seems completely non-intuitive and step intensive.

You can clear a rack and reload it even after EA has been submitted? Isnt this a loophole that should be closed? Or is this a wonky bit that only ocurrs when you are messing with demo mode by yourself?

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Saturday, April 21, 2007 - 03:04 pm: Edit

Geoff,
"Why arent some standard drones already in the ammo list...?"

They should be.

"Why cant we have 'blank' as an option in the rackspace pulldown menu...?"

It is there. It is at the bottom of the list.

"Scatterpack loadout interface is driving me crazy..."

Understood. This will be changed with the revamp of the fighter loading/shuttle selection into interface. I plan on a "Load" button on the Shuttle expendables panel. And then a window that is like the Drone racks.

"You can clear a rack and reload it even after EA has been submitted?"

I originally had this lock down after EA. But this caused problems for players. At this moment, I forget exactly what.

Paul Franz

By Gary Bear (Gunner) on Saturday, April 21, 2007 - 04:00 pm: Edit

Probably that players had forgotten to load the drone racks and/or scatterpacks.

By Geoff Conn (Talonz) on Saturday, April 21, 2007 - 07:05 pm: Edit

So a simple popup prompting players to check their ammo window before sub. T1 ea ought to fix that.

By Ted Fay (Catwhoeatsphoto) on Saturday, April 21, 2007 - 08:36 pm: Edit

Another problem was that you couldn't load the drones later if, for example, you reloaded them. That's was a problem.

By Peter Thoenen (Eol) on Sunday, April 22, 2007 - 05:27 pm: Edit

Don't want a popup as some SH's you don't start with full racks and some you start empty.

By Gary Bear (Gunner) on Sunday, April 22, 2007 - 07:35 pm: Edit

So, I'm working on the spreadsheet (up to Medium-Speed Type-IVs right now) with a line for each possible drone combination (though I'm not going crazy with all the NULL module combinations, just the ones that make sense).

Anybody want to guess how many we'll get in the end?

By Ted Fay (Catwhoeatsphoto) on Sunday, April 22, 2007 - 10:52 pm: Edit

Without doing any calculations whatsoever I'm taking a wild guess of 1500.