Archive through May 28, 2013
Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: Federation & Empire: F&E COMPUTER PROJECTS:
F&E Computer Development:
Archive through May 28, 2013
Thank you very much.
Sorry, no popcorn buttons for CB (see thread way up the line here)
Eric has indeed done some good work on his thing.
Which Aux carriers? LAV, SAV, HAV, JAV? Now is the time to speak I am wrapping up the latest updates. Please post over in the CB thread.
Jason:
I believe that is correct however they are allowed to produce games like SFBOnline and they are certainly allowed to create play aids that support the games.
Lawrence:
Some games are "flash-in-the-pan" others like War in the Pacific and its precursor, Flight Sims (X-Plane and Microsoft), Madden, and Mario Kart have been going for 20+ years.
Look I'm not suggesting that they go develop a state of the art game merely that they develop some functional computer play aids that allow the player to better facilitate face to face games, allow players to play online, and practice offline. They don't have to implement all of the rules but some would be nice.
The Cyberboard box is great however F&E is a game that takes months to play. That time could be reduced to hours with some software to keep track of many rules.
On fan sites being shut down -- a good chunk of those had SSDs that could not legally exist: empires and ships from movies and other TV series. Some had reprinted our materials and were distributing those for free and rather than take down the offending page, took down the site. Others rather than obeying the rules and putting copyright notices on SSDs chose to take down the entire site.
This isn't something we like doing, but if we want to stay in business, we HAVE to do it or lose our very special contract. You cannot judge us by what other companies do or don't do and allow or don't allow with their licensed IPs.
A computer version of F&E would be lovely, but NOT if we didn't continue to make money from it. Making it so you never had to buy a product again would be bad for us. Folks seem to think Paul Franz and ADB make a fortune from SFBOL. We wish, but no, we don't.
Paper products subsidize e23. They pay for the writers, the artists, the development time. Sales on e23 are a fraction of the paper sales. Go to e23 and check the sales figures yourselves. Remember that SJG gets a cut. Ask yourself if you would work six nine-hours-plus days a week for a monthly salary of what e23 brings in. Realize there are three full-time and two part-time employees that need paying.
I cannot prove that social media marketing pays for itself. No one says regularly, "I bought this because I saw it on ADB's page on FB." I believe folks do, but I have no firm data to back that.
I personally believe that your social media marketing has paid off. One of the challenges that ADB has historically had has been marketing to a wide audience. The fan sites and social media help in this regard. I also think that ADB does a phenomenal job with transparency.
Do paper products subsidize e23? Sure, but isn't this a chicken vs. the egg problem? I'm sure paper books subsidized ebooks on Amazon until ebooks took off as better titles were added. How many shops sell SFB products in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex, 1 until it recently closed. Brick and mortar games stores are dying. If more grade A titles start showing up on e23 I suspect sales will go up. Also don't forget the cost side of the equation. How much would ADB save a year if it only had to print 50% or 25% of what it does today? How much time would that give back to the G.O.D. ?
I have no misconception that SFBOL has not made a lot of money for ADB or Paul. There are some reasons for starters SFBOL still requires you reference a minimum of 410 pages of rules to use. SFBOL facilitates existing players in an online setting but isn't generating any new players. I would guess that your player base is only about 100 to 200 for SFBOL right now which means that paper has to subsidize it. However, I bet if you made it completely automated, and incorporated some user interface improvements, you could get at a base of at least 2,000 players which would be a small fraction of a percent of those who played some version of SFC. It doesn't mean you can't still sell existing products either. Maybe you link ships available in SFBOL to products that you purchase or even sell individual SSDs?
I think we will have to agree to disagree on fan sites. Yes there was one site in particular that had SSD's like the ones you mentioned. This site was also up for almost 20 years and never received a letter from Paramount/CBS Studios or any other IP owner. This same site also probably did more than any other, expect maybe the Unofficial SFB home page, to preserve SFB during the TFB to ADB era.
A majority of the sites I'm referring to didn't have any offending material and yet are still not here today. Now I acknowledge that ADB can't be held responsible for site owners interest levels. However my understanding from talking to two former site owners is that it had more to do with ADB not wanting to publish ships that had already been posted online and with concerns about their sites taking possible sales away by offering free ships of their own design.
Lots of questions there but typing on an iPad w/ a stylus is tedious so I'll let most wait...
In a theoretical world where there is no paper but only e23 the time savings for SVC amount to an hour a month, maybe two.
Coupla' things...
ADB and social media is all Jean. I think we need it but I am not the guy to do it.
Sites shutting down.... Other than outright pirates/torrents we haven't shut anyone down. We did not force or require or request the shutdown of sites that helped during the interregnum. We barely know they're there and didn't know some had gone, were surprised to hear about the ones we did hear about. Not our doing. If someone thought it was better for him or the game or the players that was HIS feeling and HIS decision done without asking what we thought.
As for computer games there are a lot of things we can do including full games. We would love to do them. We've spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars negotiating a dozen or more deals. None have worked because of any number of reasons. Some fear Paramount. Some expect us to fund development to the tune of more than we make a year. Two turned out to be all but crooks. One negotiated for a year then went and got a direct deal with paramount. One got to the point of a nearly-signed contract when the guy we negotiated with sold the company to someone who told him not to sign the ADB deal because HE didn't like star trek. None backed out for fear over SVC making them toe the line on rules and history. It is NOT a lack of vision but a lack of partners/programmers/publishers.
The obvious point is nobody at ADB knows how to write software so we have to make a deal with a software design/publisher.
Oh and we cannot sublicense Paramount stuff so any deal has to be a joint venture.
I walked away from one deal when the computer company president told me that He knew i could use anything trek and could not be sued. (Maybe he got that from some Internet rumor but it is not true and I will not sign a deal with someone who openly plans to do thing that would get us sued.)
I would like to mention that Social Media, fan websites, and SFBOL are very probably how most of SFB's fans continue to maintain a link to the game. When those links are severed, I believe most of ADB's repeat business will go away. Without repeat business, I believe ADB would run aground.
My understanding is that most of the fan-websites have been taken down. I am not going to speculate why, though I have heard some reasons for it. It is a shame they've been taken down, for they would have been a wonderful way to keep players interested and to bring in new blood to the game.
ADB's facebook page is probably the first foray into social media. I think it still has yet to reach a critical mass that will allow it to stand on it's feet as a respected form of advertisement.
That leaves SFBOL. I have heard countless players say that without SFBOL, they would shelve their game and ADB won't see any more of their dollars. I am one of those people. I believe the Steves' when they say that ADB doesn't see any profit from it (I find it hard to believe, but I won't dispute it). But SFBOL is *vital* to keep players in the game and introduce new blood to the system. I don't see a better way to keep player-interest in the game; what with the waning FTF opportunities expressed at various times in this BBS, the waning interest in conventions (as seen in the reducing numbers of participants in tourneys and perhaps basic attendance numbers reported by the various convention authorities (like this last Origins) ), and the complete dearth of fan-websites.
Personally, I don't think the fan websites were a big part of the last decade. If they were shut down I think it's because their job was done. They had value before the interregnum when ADB had only the BBS. They were critical during the interregnum when TFG failed. Once ADB was independent and built it's own website there just wasn't that much for fan sites to do. I do not think fan sites ever did or ever would have much to do with bringing in new blood. They mostly entertained the elite, which was their purpose. fansites were never about new blood. New blood comes in the front door and we have had a ton of it in the last decade.
ADB certainly has one of the industry's websites, and it has been successful and the core of the community. It has taken over entertaining customers of all levels and does the job fan sites had to do in the 90s.
SFBOL is great and critical and no one has ever given any indication otherwise. Sure, it would be the stupidest thing we could do to shut it down but has anyone EVER heard ADB say one word about shutting it down? NO. Not one word about that. We know it's value (which certainly isn't cash).
Facebook is worth vastly more than every fansite that ever was combined (times five) and stood on its own over a year ago. Facebook has brought back hundreds of old customers and hundreds of new ones.
SVC,
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
I'm sorry to here about the struggles you have had in the computer development arena. I wish had some advice there. I think that many people think TOS and think crappy graphics. Clearly they haven't seen Adam Turner's work. If done right SFB looks every bit as exciting as the DS9 battles.
I can see you point regarding the ADB site and Facebook being replacements. You are also correct that fan sites have really died out over the last 5 to 10 years. However, at the same time I found SFB because of fan sites. I think the ADB site doesn't duplicate fan sites in three areas:
1) New content - at one point, not counting sites violating the license, there were hundreds if not thousands of ships online. Right now we get two new CL's and one new product that interests you/has races you play per year if your lucky. The bbs used to see more of these posts until people started to think if it was posted online it wouldn't be published.
2) Playaids - Some of the best playaids, indexes, and comparisons were on fan sites. ADB should really do more in this area. Eric's SIT would make an awesome addition in this area.
3)Alternative rules for SFB - there were at least three sets of rules that enhanced the playability of SFB and were semi tested. BoM might fill this role but it sounds like existing SSDs might not be fully playable with those rules and they have yet to be published. The revolutionary edition is also exciting but it seems no progress has been made since 08.
Thousands of new ships were overkill. There are plenty in the game. Again, you prove fan sites entertained the elite rather than bring in new player. We never tracked a new customer back to a fan site.
Most of the play aides I saw had numerous errors. Most of them take way too much work to fix. Really useful play aides were sent to ADB and posted if fixable. If the SIT you speak of is the one I think I remember, it was sent to us at the start of a very busy time and when that time ended I broke my leg. Unlike fan sites we cannot just throw any untested/unchecked document up there. It has to be checked for mistakes, which takes manpower better used for new products. Were they THAT good they'd still be there.
Given the number of the rules in the game alternate rules are about the last thing needed. Except perhaps by the elite. Saying no progress has been made is just plain insulting. Shifting from proven rules to somebody's alternate is NOT progress but only distraction, diversion, and disruption. Were they any good they would still be there. I have MORE than proven my willingness to absorb any good idea.
I don't know how people find fan sites useful or even decipherable without the game. The idea that someone who was not a gamer but found a fan site and got interested in the game is dubious but even if it happened once the current ADB site does today more than all the fan sites did in the 90s.
Assuming everything you said is true (and I've shown you are wrong) the death of fan sites is something ADB did not cause and cannot change. Instead, we built the main site as a superior replacement.
All that said this is NOT the topic for any part of this conversation so feel free to drop me an email, but the bbs is no place for this. Any continuation must be treated as off-topic clutter.
Speaking of my SIT, I made a huge update to it today so it displays nearly every stat on units. I also updated all the counters and made them the same size. The few of you who know where it is are welcome to give me any feedback.
SVC, the online SIT you looked at before your leg decided to betray you, was copied directly from the online SITs, with errata. If there is anything "incorrect" it is probably just a typo, or perhaps data that isn't exposed on the site yet. I can export the data to PDF making them look identical to the current format, apply permissions so some folks could edit the data, keep track of a history of changes, and do all sorts of other things. If you select unpublished units you will see a LOT of stuff that isn't official, as I added "templates" for omega/LMC races. I need to update some entries that were in captain's logs to "proposed" to help separate out entries that have kinda sorta been published, but have no counter yet. Anyway, if you want to take a look again it is still out there and I know the community would like using it instead of a dozen PDFs.
As for my computer project. I am doing a cyberboard replacement for starters, and since my motivation is slowly creeping back up I may have an alpha in a week or two for some folks to test and help me do some optimization and find bugs. A few hours and it'll be ready, then onto bug fixes and minor feature creep, but I'm not sure a whole lot more after that could be useful.
Once its done, if I'm still into it, I'd like to make an F&E like game for computer. I say "F&E like" as I think a 100% perfect conversion would be boring, slow, and not generate any new interest. 4X games are quite popular, and AFAIK there is no game out there, computer or otherwise, very much like F&E. There is Starfire, VBAM, 5th Frontier War, and a few others that have some similarities, but are very far from a clone.
Doing a strategic SFB game on the computer could have a huge amount more detail, but play out in a fraction of the time. This is one of the reasons I've proposed new rules, love extra detail, and took on this project at all. Basically I'd rather start from scratch, and use perhaps 80% of the F&E rules as a start, but then do many other things differently to make the game more fun with a PC.
FYI, the reason I started getting more into programming sooooo long ago was when SFC came out. I saw what it could have been if the developers thought about users and extendability, and made Taldren hate me with my reverse engineering and critical analysis of how some things were easy to code (I proved it) but they never implemented them. To this day I have a desire to make a real time SFC style game, though the graphics have always stopped my progress. Now, with Windows 8 and MS being stupid with DX, I may never make it. But anyway, there is an obvious interest there on my part 
I'll try to have the Alpha done this week, but give me a couple in case I decide to watch TV with the wife instead
Eric, we should talk (next week)
I know that I had not looked at this topic in over a year and obviously a lot has happened since I looked at it. I know that Eric does seem to want to run with this project.
As I think it was Pete Dimitri that mentioned in an earlier post, there have been many that have started down this road and then been derailed. Obviously, everyone on this board probably views me in this category.
I know that part of the reason that this has failed as everyone ends up being a lone wolf in this endeavor and everyone has their own ideas about what is necessary to do this game right. I know I have expressed to some people why I thought it was odd that the Cyberboard game is more popular than Vassal game, not because of either the work of Lawrence Bergen or James Lowry and others, who both have done incredible jobs, but limitations of Cyberboard when compared to Vassal.
I know that my main goals when I started this were
1) Good graphics. However, I was just going to create the way for them to be created, not the actual graphics. I made decisions similar to Eric's about trying to have maps, planets, and everything very data driven. Someone else might have to do work to finish polishing the graphics off.
2) Good interactive play. I think an important thing was the ability to have the game update automatically if two players were playing. Particularly to facilitate movement and combat in a much more efficient manner.
3) Data management. I think one item that makes F&E unique is the ability to deal with all of the information that is on an F&E board. Counting ship equivalents, finding tugs and certain types of ships, figuring out which ships have not moved, figuring out what ships are out of supply, keeping track of fighters during combat and between turns if a ship is out of supply, etc.
At some point, I may want to reiterate our various accomplishments in these three areas, but that will be a later post.
I know different people have different ideas about what is important here. I also know that I have conveyed that we are close in the past and we really were and are, even though I have not touched this in a year, the FEOL site that I set out to create with Paul 8 years ago (good grief!) is just a little bit from being playable. I don't state that, though, to get anyone's hopes up. A couple of the things that were not working right were essential and there are several things that I was concerned about how they would go over, especially knowing what people do and do not like about the Vassal / Cyberboard experiences.
What are the next steps? I know I am curious as to what happened with Eric and Steve's conversation mentioned on 4/9/13 and I will find that out. I may have some bandwith in July and August to work on this, but I know I may have to make some hard decisions here and I also will need to talk with Paul about them. It maybe that what I decide is to help Eric, stay active on this board as a consultant, be a consultant with Paul so he can finish this off, or I may dive into the code again. I am not sure.
I know this project needs to be managed differently, though, for it to succeed, and whoever works on it needs to not be isolated. It is also frustrating to me that several things about this have been developed over and over again and that also needs to stop. If one of us drops out, we need to build on what that person accomplished it and not start over. I know Eric clearly came to some of the same conclusions and did some things similar to me. I am sure some were done better and worse, but it would have been nice for him to be able to have benifitted from the struggles I had early on in this process.
I use Eric's tool and I am looking forward to more updates. I know Eric has been working more on the data management side of things at the moment.
The SIT's are confusing and contradictory in many places. If you are a casual player (like me) it is very difficult to find which units belong to a particular group. This is especially true when you factor in that some terms are used differently and interchangeably. I know that the spreadsheet he uses to categorize a unit have more columns in it than anyone would have expected - I think there are over 70 at present count.
The computer makes it easy to do the book keeping part of F&E. The hard part is all the special rules and which units are affected by them, hence the spreadsheet with 70 columns.
I am hoping that Eric will continue to work on the project but most of the drag on the project comes from those of us not providing encouragement. There are a lot of rules that when you try to code them up are contradictory or create so many special cases I am surprised anyone gets them right.
I for one try to keep encouraging Eric because in the end I would like to see a computer help do the time consuming stuff and allow me to play the game with friends that are no longer close enough to play with.
I have 216 columns for counter data Plus another 152 for SFB data to automatically calculate data for F&E counters based on SFB stats... crazy having more stats for F&E than SFB, but that is simply the way it is... I think project creep over the years has made F&E in some ways, more complicated than SFB.
Steve said "wait till after Origins", so I'll hit him up again after that about my online SIT and maybe the F&E project.
Since there was nobody saying anything for so long, it just appeared to me that nobody except Ken seemed very interested in the project, and the couple that expressed any interest just said they had no faith in anybody ever finishing it. I was about 95% of the way to an alpha release at that time, and haven't looked at the code since my last posting.
I have a lot of interests, and a lot of things that can take up my considerable excess time, and if it is a community based project, like F&E, there simply is no reason for me to do it if I'll be the only one using it.
I apologize to Ken, who not only actually got me started in doing the online F&E (as well as my now apparently defunct F&E game) but who has tried to keep me motivated in the absence of any other motivation to work on the project.
The #2 thing I could use help with is with counter graphics I haven't done yet, the #1 thing is for people to scrub my online SIT (which uses the same data) to make sure I haven't made any typos, and to fill in some blanks (like what size is ship X in regards to tug rescue missions).
If enough people showed interest, like at least a dozen people posting weekly, I'd be motivated to continue it. Right now, I'm just not seeing enough interest to justify wasting time on it 
Eric, if you're doing it right, there's not a lot to comment on...
Another Q would be how many have access to that SIT of yours...
Is this the same tool Eric wrote last year for my Operations Level game?
I'd LOVE an easier way to input data for those close up hexes.
Just having a tool to put units on a map (that actually looks good) is a great first step.
Eric is close to having a tool that will allow a player to put units and fleets on a map and move them around.
Stew, don't worry about the SIT. Eric and I have been communicating and he understands the current limitations.
Eric- I thing the project will gain a ton of momentum more towards the end. I think that it has been promised now for so long and it hasn't yet happened and that people are not very excited because they don't think it will happen. I mean, look at how long F&E was around before ISC War was published. I am not in any way trying to discourage you, I am just saying it is hard for people to get excited about the project when so little progress that people can see has been made over the years. Coding is tough stuff. I hope you can pull through to the end.
I, as a very casual player (about one game every five years) I would love to see this become a reality.
Ken,
This is an honest question and I am not trying to be sarcastic.
Quote:
Just having a tool to put units on a map (that actually looks good) is a great first step.
Eric is close to having a tool that will allow a player to put units and fleets on a map and move them around.
Certainly the Vassal and Cyberboard projects solve this problem, so why does that need to be redone? There are other problems that they do not solve, but they can handle this one.
The F&E Online client solves this problem and dozens more as well if we can solve a memory issue.
Everyone...and I mean everyone wants F&E in a digital format to take away some of the more time consuming and tedious items in the game. Counting things is one of these. Players want easy (and quick) answers to questions such as:
How many ships in that group (fleet, stack, hex)?
How many fighters and replacement fighters in that group (fleet, stack, hex)?
What is the best force you can muster (AF/DF) in that group (fleet, stack, hex)?
What is the command rating of that group (fleet, stack, hex)?
How many top command rating ship are in that group (fleet, stack, hex)?
How many scouts in that group (fleet, stack, hex)?
There are many others.
Players have mentioned automation in a game like this where the game knows what you have in a stack of ships and the basic programming knows the rules and restrictions of building a battle force. Players want the game to give these suggestions.
IMO this would be only nice on the surface and would be an intermediate step that every player would then have to alter because of personal choice and style. The combat goals and situation cannot be known by the game and can only give basic formations. I do agree that it would be nice for the game to be able to tell you if you are violating a rule in constructing a battle force.
Stewart: A few people have access, including all the ADB folks. So they are away, and nobody has said they haven't liked it. Once Origins is over SVC can allocate some time to working out details.
Randy: Yes, well sorta, I started from scratch and was creating a system to play F&E using a computer. Something considerably more versatile than Cyberboard or VASSAL.
Shawn: I had made more progress in a couple months than anybody else has made ever. If I wouldn't have seen support die out so quickly, this would have been done already. I have lots of free time, and the hardest part about F&E for me is the graphics/map/zooming/panning/counters sorta thing, all the rest is pretty trivial.
Scott: Ken was mentioning the first step. I already have something where I can load up a game, move fleets around, create stacks, and so forth. The next step was thing like economic calculations (well technically that is done, but has no interface) and various types of enumeration for stacks. Sure, CB/Vassal do some stuff, but neither will let you determining the offensive pinning factors for a stack.
Lawrence: All of the things you listed are actually trivial based on the way I wrote code. You gave me the idea of a way to actually specify one of those 216 attributes for F&E units, and sum/average/min/max/count/etc any of the values. For example I'd have a list of values you could include when you mouseover a stack. Some folks may want to see total EW, others the max CR, yet others the total heavy fighters. On top of all the standard stuff, these values could be set by players, and extremely easily calculated with some simple loops through units in a stack adding a variable. Some though, like determining the best battleforce, will need some new values in the database, but it'd still be pretty easy to get factors like that.
Building a battleforce is a bit harder, as I don't think I defined some of the values necessary (out of those 216) that would determine if a unit HAD to be in the battleforce, or HAD to be in slow pursuit, or HAD to be a flagship, etc, etc. Basically all of this stuff falls within the SIT database I have (all accessible through the online SIT). Once all the values necessary are set for all units, it'll be a lot easier to code rules like that. For right now I simply don't have all the data necessary.
Some other things I could determine:
Average damage output of stack
Combat endurance, or turns, the stack can survive without kills
Pinning factor, both offensively and defensively (yes, they ARE different)
Most hard to hurt force (like all carrier groups)
Force to put on line and suffer least EP in losses
Max fighters on line, and endurance if all fighters lost each round
# of reserve AF/DF that can end up in a specific hex
and so forth... all of which can help speed up turns immensely. Hopefully some of the "auto-fleets" would be the same you'd put together the majority of the time, which could see a capital assault go by in just a few minutes, instead of hours, even without any AI. Heck, even damage allocation could have "recommended" buttons for things like "lowest EP" or "cheapest repair" which would recommend the losses and let you just "accept" or "modify" its recommendation.
But anyway, maybe if a bunch of people start getting into the concept of it again I'll go back and revisit it. For now, next thing on my list is creating a game for the Robotech Kickstarter miniatures I hope to see by the end of this year, and maybe working on my grand strategic computer game to simulate intergalactic war in an inversed 4X format (so start with everything, lose it due to warfare).