A couple bugs were found in the update and they have been fixed.

1) Sensor/Scanner/DamCon were being marked in the wrong order.
2) An internal error would occur if you transferred drones from Storage for a Scatter Pack.

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Sunday, January 17, 2010 - 03:38 pm: Edit

Paul, it is annoying to have to cancel the IA window because I haven't choosen the right torp in the expendables window.
Is it really neccessary to have an expendables window for plasma?

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Sunday, January 17, 2010 - 11:57 pm: Edit

Carl,
The idea of the expendables tab is to help people track what that status of the plasma torpedo tube. Maybe a better solution is to track the changes in the EA and have people prompted to set the status. Possibly popup a window listing the plasma launchers.

Paul Franz

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Monday, January 18, 2010 - 01:02 am: Edit

Yeah, the status of what's in the tube is something I keep in my mind, and select when doing the IA for launch:P

If the expendables window is just a record, or 'log', of the expendables all would be fine. IOW reflecting only settings in EA, and changes done at launch (pseudo shuttles and reservepower arming of plasma).
(After all, i can see people wanting to have somewhere to go to look for their expendable status.)


Oh, BTW, the log does not show what type of plasma is launched. Would be nice to have to info when you look back and calculate opponents plasma cycles.

By Andy Vancil (Andy) on Monday, January 18, 2010 - 04:31 pm: Edit

All you really need is a way to refresh the IA window after changes are made with expendables. This would also help when you've forgotten to set the status of a shuttle. Or better yet, the data from the expendables page would be linked to the IA form, so you could edit things right there.

Currently, you can open your speed plot from the IA window, and adjust things before making a speed change. Something analogous for drone, plasma, and shuttle launch would be nice.

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Monday, January 18, 2010 - 05:51 pm: Edit

Myself I only use the EA form and the IA window. I mess with the expendables window only because I must.

By Peter Thoenen (Eol) on Monday, January 18, 2010 - 10:53 pm: Edit

It's a bad idea .. especially for SFB and not tourney. If you want to change in tourney fine but for all us SFB players we need the expendable tab when tracking multiple ships across 10+ turns.

Also to be honest I like it how it is. See no need to change it, the rules state you have to annotate whats in the tube I believe (or drone racks) ... I really don't like the idea of configuring them on the fly.

Also if you configure them on the fly you might forget whether you launched it last turn or not. Or might forget your out of drones. Prefer to leave it as is.

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 - 12:57 am: Edit

Peter, i agree on the non-tourney thing. Or rather; I don't want to mess up for those not playing tourney.

As for forgetting what you launched that is easy; you allready have the "weapon status window".

By Peter Thoenen (Eol) on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 - 12:46 pm: Edit

Carl: That doesn't work with items like drone racks or ADD's .... you need expendables to track this; knowing when you last shot doesn't help.

Also it take me more time to click "weapon status window" that just click the load box and see if it's empty or not. (I rarely use the weapon status window to be honest for anything)

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 - 04:39 pm: Edit

I find it annoying having to cancel the IA window because I need to adjust the expendables:P. It is not nice to my opponent either.

By Jonathan Biggar (Jonb) on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 - 10:36 pm: Edit

You don't have to cancel it. Just change the activity type selector back to something before launch plasma, fix your expendbles and change it back.

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - 02:20 am: Edit

tnx, that will do until Paul can improve the process!

By Clayton Krueger (Krieg) on Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 12:08 pm: Edit

I might be missing something, but shouldn't there be a step in the IA activity window, after 6D 'fire allocation stage', for 6E Post Combat Stage? Shouldn't deploying reserve power for delayed uses under H7.132 be recorded?

By Ted Fay (Catwhoeatsphoto) on Thursday, February 04, 2010 - 10:35 pm: Edit

Request for feature.

Currently, if a fighter or shuttle dies, the fighter SSD is not removed from the fighter tab. It would be nice if that happened.

Also, if a fighter or shuttle takes damage, then later you repair the damage, I think the damage still remains. Can that be removed automatically?

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Friday, February 26, 2010 - 11:25 pm: Edit

PAUL, I just found the off board thing! Great to have but may I suggest an improvement? I don't like that it's part of the Board tab as it cut the size of the map. Wouldn't it be better if it was on a separate tab, or perhaps as tab on the expendables window?

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Saturday, February 27, 2010 - 10:51 pm: Edit

I can see it as a separate tab that can become a floating window.

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Saturday, February 27, 2010 - 11:28 pm: Edit

I use the "shot chat area" option and split vertically. I noticed today there should be room for more than just the audience list and chat window. Perhaps Off map, discard pile and Range tracker?

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 01:27 pm: Edit

Paul, when loading a saved game the chat log is not included. Would be nice if it was.

By Peter Thoenen (Eol) on Friday, March 26, 2010 - 07:38 pm: Edit

Paul:

Good deal on the new client update, like the larger counters. Any chance you can make the shadow configurable though such as on or off; some folk love them, some folk hate them

By Peter Thoenen (Eol) on Friday, May 07, 2010 - 09:04 pm: Edit

Paul:

I was listening to the latest podcast (btw I do listen to these weekly even if I can't show up, great service you are doing) and noticed a discussion about calendaring; shortly followed by google spam.

Anyways I am torn on the issue: on one hand I think it would be helpful to the community but on the other hand not sure just how helpful v. spending your time on something else. That being said I think it is more valuable then lets say, ipad or iphone support especially in handling tournaments and campaigns.

I think both Barry (in his email) and you are approaching this wrong. On your end no need to offer a halfass solution or re-invent the wheel and on Barry's end he seems to think we all want to join the borg. What I would highly suggest is you simply stand up a standards compliant webcalendar which authenticates with the existing SFBOL authentication process so folk don't have the need to create separate accounts. As far as effort, extremely minimal, one day tops and you can install it on the existing server.

The three products below (in order of preference) all fit the bill in addition to be low cost (license free, only cost is your time and server resources). Other products would work but have a licensing cost. All three support the ICal protocol which allows native interfacing with Outlook, Thunderbird, Sunbird, and any client which supports the standard calender format. All also support authentication (tie it into SFBOL), public anonymous viewing, and web calendaring (for folk that don't want to access via a client and prefer just viewing/editing via http). Lastly they all support local automatic time zone translation so you can enter your times locally and it will show them locally for folk in their timezones.

1: http://www.sun.com/software/products/calendar_srvr/

2: http://trac.calendarserver.org/

3: http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php

By Barry Kirk (Barrykirk) on Saturday, May 08, 2010 - 10:31 am: Edit

Peter,

Sorry about the google spam. I thought that the google calender worked different than it did.

With my strategy guides, google servers out those documents. All you need is the link to the strategy guides to view them.

Naively I thought the calender would be similar, but apparently you need a google account to access/edit it. Or I would need to open things to the point where it would compromise peoples privacy.

The only problem I have with using the existing server is that many peoples work firewalls tend to block it. I know mine does.

I'm looking for a way for people to schedule games as long as they have an internet connection even if they are at work.

The existing system where unless you have a scheduled opponent, your basically looking for a pickup game needs a larger player base to work properly.

By Peter Thoenen (Eol) on Saturday, May 08, 2010 - 02:22 pm: Edit

Barry:

Negative on the firewall blocking. Your work is blocking the SFBOL ports is my guess, the server-side calender is port 80/443 so if you can hit http://www.sfbonline.com/index.jsp from work you can hit the new calendar.

BTW the more I think about it the more I like it though once again not sure if worth the cost.

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Thursday, May 13, 2010 - 03:15 pm: Edit

Paul, could you make a change to the weapons chart?
Now and then I look at the Ph-2 chart instead of the Ph-3 chart (like when I am tired).
Could you change the order ofthe charts?
The most commonly used are the Ph-1 and Ph-3 and it make sense to have them side by side.

By Peter Thoenen (Eol) on Friday, May 14, 2010 - 02:24 am: Edit

Paul / Aaron / Barry:

Was listening to the podcast tonight and you all completely missed the ball. Just look at my earlier post and install the !@#$% freeware one already; they are enterprise ready, can handle ALL the multiple devices (phones, et al), aggregation, and granularity you want, et al. and all super easy and quick to setup.

Web Block:

These are black lists that are updated daily and are based on both IP and FQDN. As you alluded to in the podcast, use a proxy .. tor is your friend (tor.eff.org) or i2p (www.i2p2.de) .. tor will handle browser and sfbol client, i2p will only handle your browser

Phasers:

Leave them alone

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Friday, May 14, 2010 - 01:02 pm: Edit

Peter,
Sorry I missed your post earlier. I will check the servers out this week.