Archive through December 14, 2012
Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: Federation & Empire: F&E COMPUTER PROJECTS:
F&E Computer Development:
Archive through December 14, 2012
I LOVE the paste to clipboard button. That's worth its weight in gold right there! You can put the resolution back to what you had it. My intent was to copy and paste the image to email to folks. You've solved that, and my laptop screen resolution is now irrelevant.
Eric, again, outstanding work! John is right, this can be a good replacement for Cyberboard. It's way more flexible and people can edit text files much easier.
And yes, once I get Kzinti space done, I'll send you all the text files.
Cool, I changed the form back so it has a border, though it is a bit smaller than it was before.
No other code changes.
I also went through and renamed most of the gorn ships (minus a few duplicate names, like BDE which is both a brigade and battle destroyer escort). Also renamed the general stuff.
Download link updated (6/8 @ 3:02)
When I was sitting here thinking about emailing you the operational hexes, it occurred to me that it would be cool to have some sort of mechanism where people can share their games/campaigns without overwriting their current text files.
Make sense?
Eric,
Which download link was updated? There are a couple of them in the posts.
Could we ask to have the link put in the header of the topic?
http://goodsects.gotdns.com/f&e.zip
If you want multiple "campaigns", simply make a new folder, call it whatever you want, then add the years within it. The only real limit to the number of "galaxy" or "campaign" maps you can have would be the resolution of your screen and how many items can appear on the dropdown menu.
Eric I just want to thank you again for the effort you have put into this.
Maybe I'm missing something but the deployment dropdown seems to have disappeared is that the case?
Yeah, the whole deploying of fleets I removed. Mostly because it was yet another layer to code all the other updates I made, and it wasn't fully working anyway (you could place units on the map, but it didn't remove them from fleet deployment lists). The code is all kinda still there, but it is kinda useless as there was simply no supporting functionality.
I'd love to try to do a full computer adaptation of F&E, but there are 3 things preventing me from doing that.
#1. Interface design is an artistic thing, and I have very little artistic ability.
#2. Actual design on how the game would interact with people. For example, moving a stack around and potential reaction movement means for each stack being moved, up to 7 or so impulses need tracked and any player can stop the game at any point during that... just not sure how to do it.
#3. Staying focused on it, which means I need a HUGE amount of support to keep me motivated, and frankly I just don't think F&E has that kind of following.
Oh, I guess 4 things, the whole computer/SFB/licensing thing may trump all of the other 3.
Eric,
In my opinion you’re at least 80% on the way to being able to replace cyberboard.
#1 won't matter much for this crowd.
The fix for #2 for right now is as simple as adding a save function and an advance impulse function. For play by e-mail or chat you just need to be able to transfer a file back and forth.
The nice thing about your solution is that you can add some custom stats and maybe even a built in battle helper later on that is tailored to F&E.
I know what you mean about #3. Every couple years I think about doing a F&E program and then I get distracted with something else
.
Looking at cyberboard it has a lot more polish than anything I have done. Granted, I could do some code that'd help like totaling the pinning factors for a stack, or the total fighters and combat power of a fleet, or whatever. I guess it really comes down to just tracking all the units, which isn't really that hard. Maybe I'll tinker with it someday, who knows.
Yeah, but you have set the groundwork for that polish. Truth be told, what makes the Cyberboard box so cool is the graphics, which can simply be ripped and put in your program.
For instance, I can totally change the look of your map to do basically anything I want. Heck, I probably can even turn it into a SFM map, if I really wanted to.
Naw man, THIS is a quality piece of work.
The work you have done already is high quality.
If time is an issue, Eric, perhaps you can hand it off to Ken or me (far less preferable, since I probably am not nearly as good at it as you guys are).
Just a thought...
I'm doing a little standalone exe utliity now that'll let you easily move through a turn sequence. With 5 pages of just turn sequence at http://www.starfleetgames.com/sfb/sfin/F&E_SoP.pdf I figured it may help people. Plus I'd have to implement the same sorta thing in any F&E implementation.
I'm thinking about trying the whole F&E conversion again. I'm quite a bit more experienced than a couple years back when I last took a stab at it, give me a week or so to see what kinda progress I can make. There is a lot of preliminary design work that needs to be done to support everything later down the road.
Oh, if anybody is interested, you can download the source in VB.NET for Visual Studio 2010 at http://goodsects.gotdns.com/F&E_Source.zip
Rules/License:
#1. Don't sell it
#2. If you do anything cool with it, let me know so I can check it out and see what I inspired
#3. If you do decide to further it, let people know on here so ya'll can perhaps collaborate, that way there aren't 3+ versions floating around that confuses people
The really neat thing about Eric's mapping tool is for moderators who would like to run a campaign and have a mapping tool / maps for the players.
Has anyone posted a link to this topic on a webpage somewhere? We just got a Latvian spammer in here and I'd rather not have it continue, so if you did post it, please take down the link.
Thanks,
Jean
WebMom
I had one I had posted a while back, I just added a general reference to here with no URL. Sorry if I was the culprit, those darned web crawler spam bots along with spam bots should be the ones facing our military wrath ;)
I have been trying to convince Eric to work on the next part of the F&E mapping software. I would like to see where you could put down units/fleets and have it calculate provence ownership (and maybe EP).
He said if 10 people were interested he might work on it. I was hoping to get 10 people who would use this feature to chime in.
I would like to use this feature to run campaigns.
Not looking like you'll find 10 
10 people will give me the motivation to write something that lets you play out F&E games *much* faster. No more ship counting, budgets are easy, construction/conversions are easy, no more tracking, anything, all tables integrated in, internet play (not pbem but real time play), custom maps/ships/etc, things like heat maps showing ship/compot/fighter/etc densities across the whole map, etc, etc, etc...
But I need people to keep me motivated and help me bounce issues off of them. Without that support, or that much need, I'd probably get bored and move on to something else.
I would love an option like that. Easy, all forms in one place, in game calculations with one click (or whatever), automatic EP calculator for each empire, auto capture clocks, etc...!
It's almost Christmas so the wish list could go on for a while!
But we need a bunch of people to actually e-mail Eric or post here. I have been using his mapping software and I find it easy to create maps. I would like to see the next steps done so that campaigns can be played easily.
The Andros counters he did look really nice and could be used until official counters are released.
I would like to be able to play a galaxy wide game that starts in Delta and goes through Omega. Add random monsters, the Andros and Juggernaughts (as players) would add a really nice twist.
So if there are another 8 people who would be willing to run the software and provide feedback we could get a really cool tool.
My wish list would be:
- Fog of War, if you can't see it then you don't know what is going on.
- One month movement turns where everyone moves at the same time (which would go along with the Fog of War).
Where can I get this tool and where can I learn about it?
Are you looking to run this as an F&E campaign?
Oooo, fog of war. I thought about this the other day.
Imagine playing a computer F&E, and when you click a stack outside of range of anything it just shows you a #. If it is in sensor range, you see a # of SC2, SC3, and SC4 ships. That'd speed the game up by people not quite micromanaging so much. Heck, units outside of range 6 could be completely hidden unless you send an ES&S mission.
I'd also LOVE to see an impulse system. Instead of a "phasing" turn and a "non-phasing" turn, merge both. Movement is done on an impulse basis, the normal "phasing" player moves second (so each turn they swap who moves second in a tie). It'd keep the ebb and flow of the game down a bit, not sure if it'd drastically change the game as a whole.
Matthew, you can read back a bit on this thread to see more about it, or just download it at http://goodsects.gotdns.com/f&e.zip
Assuming 10 folks chime in with their dedicated support behind this I'll do it.
HOWEVER, there are a lot of things I know SVC did during the design process to make the game more playable, keep counter count down (I think he failed at that, we probably all have 10K counters by now!). For example, I could actually track ship refits, something not realistically possible with the game on pen and paper.
When most games that go from board to computer get dumbed down, I think F&E could be really awesome if "smartened up"... well, smartened isn't real appropriate, but a lot of rules that were subsumed or simplified in order to make a great board game, could revert back to super complex when a computer keeps track of everything.
If I took on this project, it would essentially be F&E on computer. Not a tool like cyberboard, but something that can almost completely do an F&E game against another player. AI is even a future possibility.
To recap some "new rules" I'd like to see done:
- Fog of War/limited intelligence
- Ship Refits (with decimal points!)
- Ship experience (perhaps 1% more attack/defense per round spent on the line without being crippled)
- Adding rules for the LMC, Omega, Early years, simulator races, etc
- X2 and X3 could be FAR more easily integrated in with F&E than SFB
- More than just crippled/ok, I could track even a single point of damage on a unit.
Feel free to chime in with anything you'd like to see that you can't really do now.
Eric, before proceeding, you need to get with SVC and Paul Franz. That sort of development needs to be done in some way that is legal and also follows the rules of F&E.
Jean
WebMom