How about adding a repair cost chart under misc. charts? Annex #9? Thanks!

By Jack Taylor (Jtaylor) on Wednesday, May 06, 2020 - 11:41 am: Edit

Another enhancement request:

Implement a way to calculate the number of opponent movements pretty much identical to the way you set speed plots during energy allocation.

My idea is that you could easily mirror the plot of your opponent and it would calculate potential moves through the end of the turn. So...you could easily see how many moves so far during the turn, and could theorize the amount of moves through the end of the turn. There would need to be a way to account for 2/3rds movers here of course.

Honestly, it is time consuming to calculate opponent movements and everyone does it. And everyone screws it up by "1" somehow.

So why not make it a little easier?

By Gregory S Flusche (Vandar) on Wednesday, May 06, 2020 - 02:39 pm: Edit

So you want a good science officer

By Jack Taylor (Jtaylor) on Wednesday, May 06, 2020 - 08:56 pm: Edit

one that can count.

By Frank Lemay (Princeton) on Wednesday, May 06, 2020 - 10:39 pm: Edit

I suggest you learn how to count Jack …………………… :>)

Cheers
Frank

By Jack Taylor (Jtaylor) on Tuesday, May 12, 2020 - 10:09 pm: Edit

I see we have a new client update which I applied. Is there someplace to look that talks about what was changed in the client for each patch release?

Thanks

By Sloane Dressler (Major_Wood) on Saturday, May 23, 2020 - 10:26 am: Edit

I have a possible idea for how to improve 3rd gen SSDs.

I, too, would pay substantially more for a subscription (like even double) to use the original all-boxes SSDs, even if that meant I could only play with others who’d done the same. The 3rd gen ones are sharp and pretty, but I don't care for them because you can't tell at a glance how beat up a ship is, like on the older, all-boxes 'real' SSDs: you have to count, which takes up precious bandwidth esp. in larger battles, and they look basically undamaged right up to destruction. NOT the same, or even close. I also wish the 3rd gen ones had consistent shields: some have a single counter box, others have a shield strip that goes colored like a progress bar. Prefer the latter.

BUT:

I wondered if there might be a way to 'dim' the boxes as they tally down, to help the ship actually look damaged at a glance. An undamaged box (which is often a group of boxes) is white, one that loses X % goes to medium gray, dark gray… probably only 3 or 4 stages total, not “% dim by actual % of boxes lost” (like 14 stages for a standard 15-box warp engine) unless that’s easy to do, and never totally black probably (unless you then inverted the text color to white or gray). And/OR, if there were a way to add temporary ‘damage’ semitransparent gifs to the graphic of the ship a la ‘stick-on bullet holes’ you used to find at auto shops. Like a selection of a dozen gray blast-smudges that could be applied automatically, appearing near or centered roughly on boxes, getting darker as the box tallies down. Not perfect, as some boxes are outside the ship graphic, but it could help. My apologies if someone has suggested this before.

By Gregory S Flusche (Vandar) on Saturday, May 23, 2020 - 11:35 am: Edit

The main problem if you have not noticed the inconsistency. of the 3rd Gen SSDs. They were all made by a group of people. Each did some SSDs of there favorite races. Others did what ever was needed. These SSDs had to be finished in a time limit or cause real problems with SFBOL to keep running. Some of the art work was done in color some black and white.

I am so grateful that those people put in the hard work to get the SSDs done. So we could keep playing on SFBOL. I keep my paper copies of the ships and the other players ships on hand for a game. (yes it is easier)

We still do at times find ships that are incorrect in some way. Report it on the BBS and the person who made it can get in and fix it.

If You do not like a SSD go ahead and tell Paul. I am sure He can hook you up with how to make a new one You like. Except of course not the paper SSDs as that is copyright infringement. Witch is why we have to have the countdown SSDs. They are the best plan that was come up with.

By Sloane Dressler (Major_Wood) on Monday, May 25, 2020 - 03:08 pm: Edit

Rather than retract my initial post, I'll just say that a client re-install has shown me that some (probably almost all) 3rd gen SSDs DO 'dim'/have counter bars in tally boxes, which is considerably closer than I'd thought, to being able to gauge a ship's condition at a glance. Thanks for the background, certainly! The more I learn about this utility, the more awesome it's becoming.

By Jason Gray (The_Hood) on Thursday, July 16, 2020 - 08:15 am: Edit

Gatling-Phaser on SFBOL

Currently the Gatling-Phaser is shown in 'My Weapon Status' as a single weapon, resulting in a poor recording of the weapons use, and an inconsistent record of power used.

Since a Gatling is effectively Four Phaser-3s, each with it's own 8-Impulse firing cycle, with a power cost of .25 energy, would it not be possible to have the weapon simply appear as Four Phaser-3s in the Direct FIRE and Weapon Status windows, and when the Gatling on the SSD is hit all four are simply show as Destroyed in the respective windows.

By Peter Bakija (Bakija) on Monday, February 01, 2021 - 09:01 am: Edit

Paul,

In using the Vudar TC, it turns out that the IPG is not particularly well served by the current interface:

-The IPG is announced during the ESG step in the Seeking Weapons segment of IA. There is no notation in the IA pulldown menu for IPG (just adding a few words in the IA menu probably helps that; IPG is announced in the same step as ESGs).

-The IPG activates during direct fire (so you announce it earlier in IA, but it fires during the DF step), but the DF step menu doesn't actually let you fire the IPG to indicate it has been used.

Granted, the IPG can fire over multiple impulses, so it is possible that this was intentional. But the lack of an IPG note in IA certainly is somewhat problematic (as looking up when the IPG happens isn't super easy; it isn't in the MRB, as the MRB doesn't have the Impulse Procedure annex; I can only find the exact step where the IPG happens in the Vudar module rulebook, which I suspect isn't handily available to most folks :-)

By Jack Taylor (Jtaylor) on Saturday, February 20, 2021 - 10:59 am: Edit

Maybe there is already a way to see this or make it happen within the client but I don't think so...

Enhancement request - Please save all the details of the game we can see in game control when saving the game.

So save all conversation, moves, firings, internals, impulse activity, etc. Save it all so that when you re-open the game all those details scan be reviewed later by simply scrolling up like we have to while actively playing the game. I know the log saves keys point in activity but still it would be better just to save everything, cause why not?

By Jack Taylor (Jtaylor) on Saturday, February 20, 2021 - 11:02 am: Edit

I think I see this already logged as a client enhancement request. Seems like a big one to me that may have been around a while. Is it a hard one?

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Sunday, February 21, 2021 - 10:40 am: Edit

Jack,
I can see what I can do. The tough part is that those logs can be pretty big and the whole log is stored in memory. So it is possible to add and would probably need to prompt you whether you want to restore in case it gets so large that you are no longer able to load the game file.

By Jack Taylor (Jtaylor) on Sunday, February 21, 2021 - 11:07 am: Edit

I can see how the log could get huge, especially in large and complex fleet battles. Maybe too huge for those and probably not really used there either. I only play tournament games- maybe just save the content for those?

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Sunday, February 21, 2021 - 01:18 pm: Edit

Jack,
It is possible to save.

By Jack Taylor (Jtaylor) on Sunday, February 21, 2021 - 03:02 pm: Edit

Awesome! Add it to the pile, whenever you can.

By Jack Taylor (Jtaylor) on Saturday, February 27, 2021 - 02:47 pm: Edit

Ok another enhancement idea- On the EAF. If you play a bunch of turns the EAF stretches out to the right so much that it is hard to use. As an example, last night I intended to put a point in tractor but instead put it in transporters because the row headings were so far from my current turn allocation I guess. I did compress the column widths as much as they could be to try an improve the situation.

I think it would be better to keep the current turn allocation or new allocation on the far left and shift prior turn(s) allocations to the right.

That way you could keep the few most recent turns expanded if you want and not move the current allocation so far from the row headings. I know it is backwards from the way it has always been. Perhaps no one will like this idea.

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Saturday, February 27, 2021 - 08:49 pm: Edit

Jack,
Agreed that it would be helpful for players. Here is my only concern and that is players will then ding me for not keeping as close to be original as possible.

But I will definitely consider it and most probably due it.

By wayne douglas power (Wayne) on Sunday, February 28, 2021 - 12:52 am: Edit

Most of these enhancements seem reasonable, and as Jack has noted, some can be just for Tournaments (due to memory size).

all good

By Gregg Dieckhaus (Gdieck) on Monday, March 01, 2021 - 02:24 pm: Edit

or you could make it so you can hide columns like in excel

By Jack Taylor (Jtaylor) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 02:46 pm: Edit

Please add the ability to name the "quick plots" that you can save and reuse game to game when defining ship speed during allocation. The ability to save and delete these plots is already there and works. I just think it would be far more useful if we could label those plots for use when we are looking for them in order to find the one we want from the list easier.

By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 08:33 pm: Edit

Jack,
I will look into that. Sounds like something that should be relatively easy to do.

By Jack Taylor (Jtaylor) on Sunday, May 23, 2021 - 10:23 am: Edit

Thanks!

By Jack Taylor (Jtaylor) on Tuesday, August 31, 2021 - 10:51 pm: Edit

Here is an awesome enhancement idea:

Add functionality on the phaser weapons chart to account for the cloak modifiers when calculating damage.

Maybe click a check box to tell the client it is a roll that needs to be modified. Then when the player picks the correct modified range and clicks the roll the client calculates and adds up the damage.