Paul,
I've noticed that when allocating expeditures with the Andro, there are no options to differentiate between PA mines and standard TBombs. Will this be the norm?

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Monday, December 13, 2010 - 01:13 pm: Edit

Glenn,
Good point. I will look into fixing this.

By Glenn Hoepfner (Ikabar) on Monday, December 13, 2010 - 10:32 pm: Edit

Thank you.

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Tuesday, December 14, 2010 - 05:54 pm: Edit

Paul, I need a way to re-set the speed plot after emer decel. Hopefully you could include that with the proposed change to speed plot above (the one with the plot having a memory.)

By Barry Kirk (Barrykirk) on Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - 11:06 pm: Edit

Paul,

d. The reason for that is for systems like the whip crack torpedo. The whip crack torpedo can only be armed with reserve power. It can never use allocated power.

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Thursday, December 16, 2010 - 08:43 am: Edit

Barry,
The only reason to add this is to easily see the reserve power usage of the whip crack in the EA. Currently there is a place on the EA for keeping a running total of the reserve power being used. You can look at the "Weapon Status" tab to see when the weapon was used. And when I finally implement it the reserve power tracker will tell you when and what your reserve power was used for.

I think that pretty much covers it.

BTW, if I added that, I would need to add the changing of the EA for Disruptors to allow the denoting of the energy used for it using reserve power.

By Barry Kirk (Barrykirk) on Friday, December 17, 2010 - 06:30 am: Edit

Yes, the reserve power tracker is the ideal solution. I was just suggesting this as an interim solution.

By Barry Kirk (Barrykirk) on Friday, December 17, 2010 - 06:35 am: Edit

Paul,

Don't know if this is the proper place to post this. Now that e23 is starting to kick in. I'm wondering if it would be possible to create an IPad App that would take a ship card from e23 and display that ship card in such a way that you can mark stuff up on it.

Damage, Power Used, Weapons Arming/Fired Status.

That would be too cool.

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Sunday, December 19, 2010 - 06:34 pm: Edit

Paul, I wonder if it would be possible to make something like the range radius things, but for Klingon fire arcs?

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Sunday, December 19, 2010 - 08:28 pm: Edit

Carl,
It is possible. But it would make drawing the board slow. Of course, I would need to understand the Klingon arcs. Outside of the hexes shown in the rulebook. I really didn't see the pattern.

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Sunday, December 19, 2010 - 09:33 pm: Edit

Any kind of play aid would nice. Maybe you could ask SPP to get a nice gif file with extended arcs to use as basis for a chart?

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - 08:05 am: Edit

Paul, over in the Tournament Rules Q&A Andy has posted two useful charts for cloaking Retain and Regain. I think they would be nice to add to the client since actually computing the values needed when some cloak can be hard on newbies and veterans alike.

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - 10:06 pm: Edit

Added and will be in the next update.

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - 10:32 pm: Edit

Cool! Tnx.

By Peter Thoenen (Eol) on Sunday, February 20, 2011 - 01:10 am: Edit

Paul:

How difficult would it be to add mouse wheel zoom support. I.e. one mouse wheel "tick" would equal +-1 zoom level.

Pretty much all modern games support this and seems like something pretty cookie cutter.

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Sunday, February 20, 2011 - 03:02 pm: Edit

Peter,
Done. It will be available with the next update.

By Xander Fulton (Dderidex) on Sunday, February 20, 2011 - 09:32 pm: Edit

Oh, nice - didn't even think to ask about that, but what a killer update!

BTW - one of the things mentioned in SFB Online a few months back I was hoping to see, but hasn't happened, yet.

When using the 'covered' grid to indicate a cloaked ship, there is no transparency...so you can't see which way the cloaked ship is facing. That'd be kinda nice...if the grid option was present, but retained transparency.

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Sunday, February 20, 2011 - 10:32 pm: Edit

Yeah. It is on the to do list. Lost it for a little bit there.

By Jacob Karpel (Psybomb) on Wednesday, March 09, 2011 - 01:32 am: Edit

Baduvai and Maghadim TCs:

The EAFs of these ships show General Reinforcement (which they cannot do) and lack a Repair/DamCon slot (which they most certainly need). Not sure if this is the case with LMC non-tourney ships, but it is critical to their function.

By Xander Fulton (Dderidex) on Sunday, March 20, 2011 - 10:52 pm: Edit

Well, about a month since my last post, and...

Still crushed.

Crushed, I say...

...that my favorite marker for cloaked ships (the 'covered' grid) is still not transparent.

Much weeping! Gnashing of teeth. Sadness and sorrow!

By William T Wilson (Sheap) on Wednesday, March 23, 2011 - 09:27 pm: Edit

Feature request:
Counters on the board are usually sorted in the order in which they were added to the board, so the oldest unit is on the bottom, and newer on the top.
But, this causes trouble when ships are passing through a drone wave, or when something is escorted by an ECM drone. All you can see is the drones. It also means that ships that TAC have their POT counters always on top of them, causing annoyance. This also affects fleets in formation (but not stacked in a hex), whose POT/POS markers and seeking weapons always get in each other's way.

Three things would help here (in order of my preference):
1) Reverse the draw order so newer units are drawn below older ones (perhaps not on the impulse the new unit is created, so you can still see newly-launched stuff).
2) Make the "rotate stack" button, which allows the stacking order to be changed manually, retain its effect over time. Right now the effect of this lasts only until units next move.
3) (Only if #1 is not implemented) Allow for an option of "hide unit" which would make it invisible on the map but not in game control (to the player requesting the hiding only). This way at least ships would be visible under their ECM drones as you could hide the drones you don't want to look at.

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Wednesday, March 23, 2011 - 11:02 pm: Edit

1) That is not really possible.
2) That is hard. I will see about it. Retaining the order. I say it is hard because how do you define the order when the pieces in the stack constantly is changing?
3) This might be possible.

It would be easy enough to define an order based on the type of unit. And since when you launch an ECM drone, the drone is linked to the unit that relative order is easy enough.

By William T Wilson (Sheap) on Thursday, March 24, 2011 - 03:54 am: Edit

Many units don't launch their own ECM drones, so special case based on that won't really work. And there's more to the stacking order issue than just ECM drones anyway.

I wasn't necessarily suggesting that you keep track of the launch impulse of every unit or whatever and then sort them, just that if you took the current draw order and reversed it, it would probably work out better most of the time.

But, an order based on the type of unit would be fine, maybe better than what I was suggesting. I would put shuttles on top, then ships, then seeking weapons, then mines, then POT/POS, and finally everything else on the bottom in "I don't care" order (terrain, ESG records, web, ...). I'm flexible about shuttles vs ships, but the way I see it, if a shuttle is in the same hex as a ship, something is probably happening that involves the shuttle, and if not, the stack won't stay stacked for long. But if you don't want people to complain, allow players to set their own priority - and anyway I can imagine there might be situations where changing the order on the fly would be something you'd want.

BTW, if you do implement hidden units, they should probably reappear temporarily while selected.

By William T Wilson (Sheap) on Saturday, April 02, 2011 - 12:47 am: Edit

Trying to set up a scenario using megafighters...

There doesn't seem to be support for megafighter refits to fighters. I had thought of building specific SSDs for the megafighter version of a given fighter, but that's a lot of extra SSDs (and none of the fighters I looked at had megafighter SSD versions).

What's the current recommended way to deal with megafighters in SFBOL?

By Peter Thoenen (Eol) on Saturday, April 02, 2011 - 03:58 am: Edit

Sheap:

I believe the SSD is the only way and we are all waiting on Aaron. I believe this has been discussed before but not sure. Ideally a "refit" would work the same way as ship SSD's with black refit boxes but I think the talk was a second set of SSD's would just be easier.