I made a econ assistant program for F&E using Access/VBA. Got it to the point where I could swap control of planets, provinces and neutral zone hexes. The program would also keep track of exhaustion and XTP.

Started working on implementing surveys when the local F&E group stopped playing and I abandoned development.

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Sunday, February 10, 2019 - 10:02 pm: Edit

2/10/18

Slow but productive, realized I could convert my old map generator program data structures and functions to Java so started doing that. I had not known how to do windows graphics programming, so wrote my own routines for doing hexes and circles and such. As Java has things that I understand for doing that, I will use those instead.

That's right, first I re-invented the wheel, now I'm un-inventing my re-inventing? :p

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Sunday, February 17, 2019 - 08:17 pm: Edit

It's been a slow week, but I spent some time going over the old code considering how I want to approach some things.

In some ways it can do a flexible map, but in other ways some things are hard coded. I can probably make it do a scalable map, but there might be issues. Still thinking about it really.

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Sunday, February 24, 2019 - 10:59 pm: Edit

It will certainly be a scalable map as monitor resolutions and set ups vary quite a bit. My vision is fairly bad, so I'd want big hexes and such, while other people wouldn't.

Been sick with a cold all week which hasn't helped progress, but I've been slowly working on it.

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Monday, March 04, 2019 - 10:15 pm: Edit

Some health issues have prevented much work, I am currently working on classes to represent a SIT. It's tricky I think.

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 - 07:44 pm: Edit

Probably will be working on classes for dealing with the parts of a SIT line item for now, latest is making a class for handling F&E dates:

public class YDate {
public final String FALL = "Fall";
public final String SPRING = "Spring";
private String season;
private int yYear;
private YDate turnZero;

public YDate(String initSeason, int initYear )
{
season = initSeason; // this parameter should only be YDate.FALL or YDate.SPRING;
yYear = initYear;
turnZero = new YDate( SPRING, 168 );
}

int turnsElapsed( YDate thatDate ) {
int result = yYear - thatDate.yYear;
result *= 2;
if( result == 0) {
if( season.equals(thatDate.season)) return result;
else if( season == SPRING ) {
result--; return result; }
else { result++; return result; }
}
else if( result > 0 ) {
if( season.equals(thatDate.season)) return result;
else if( season == SPRING ) {
result--; return result; }
else { result++; return result; }
}
else
if( season == thatDate.season)) return result;
else if( season == SPRING ) {
result++; return result; }
else { result--; return result; }
}
public int compareTo( YDate other ) {
int result = yYear - other.yYear;
if( result == 0)
if( season != other.season )
{
if( season == SPRING ) result = -1;
else
result = 1;
}
return result;
}
}
}

}

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Sunday, March 17, 2019 - 12:14 pm: Edit

So working on SIT related stuff some more.

Class for factors.

At the moment I'm working on a Class for cargo, basically anything a ship design can carry around, be it EPs, fighters, PFs etc. This may be somewhat complicated. I'm thinking that tug missions might be handled this way. Have a tug have a list of pod-missions it can carry as 'cargo' and each pod mission have a list of things it can carry 'ie mobile base' for a move / msetup mobile base mission. But on the other hands, some missions need more than one unit to carry them. Perhaps make 'group' counters for this, ie a Kzinti 2LTT counter has a list of possible Cargo... hmm... need to think more about this.

By Sam Benner (Nucaranlaeg) on Sunday, March 17, 2019 - 05:27 pm: Edit

Sounds like you want a many-to-many relationship - each ship can have zero or more Cargo (as bases and SCS have fighters and PFs), and each Cargo has zero or more ships. Cargo could have requirements as to what could carry it so that you don't end up with DNs carrying battle pods.

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Sunday, March 17, 2019 - 07:37 pm: Edit

Yes, that sounds like a good way to deal with this. Thanks.

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Tuesday, March 26, 2019 - 08:43 pm: Edit

Another slow week, still working on how to represent carrying capacity in blueprints of units. Though ADM, PTs, Cloaked Decoys and other people/objects are not going to be in this version of the program, the data structure should probably be able to handle them so that later expansion of the project to including expansion rules will go (much) more smoothly.

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Monday, April 01, 2019 - 11:32 pm: Edit

Worked a bit on some menu stuff, not much done this week. Old friend got in touch with me and got me to do this programming challenge thing where you try to program the AI to land a mars lander without crashing.

Graphics look like that old 70s arcade game lunar lander, except it's red.

Probably going to distract me while I try to figure it out!

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Monday, April 22, 2019 - 08:36 pm: Edit

April has been a troublesome month for me. I find time to do a little work on the project, but mostly I've been trying to get a better handle on some of the complexity of various Java classes.

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Monday, May 06, 2019 - 01:19 am: Edit

I have been doing poorly as my vision has deteriorated and it is hard to do much, in the past things have cleared up over time and I am scheduled to see a retina specialist Wednesday, so hopefully things will improve.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, July 07, 2019 - 06:50 am: Edit

This topic could use annual archives allowing deletion of lots of ancient posts.

By Ryan Opel (Feast) on Sunday, July 07, 2019 - 04:14 pm: Edit

Deleted what I already had archived.

Working on the rest.

By Ken Kazinski (Kjkazinski) on Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - 11:59 pm: Edit

Richard,

Any progress to report?

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Wednesday, July 31, 2019 - 12:13 am: Edit

Nope. Since my eyes went bad I put this on hold until no sooner than I recover from surgery. At that time I will need to consider what I want to do and whether it is too cumbersome to try to code or not. Thsos wpm
t be for a couple months or so, but at least the surgery went well and I am cautiously optimistic about future prospects.

By Ted Fay (Catwhoeatsphoto) on Friday, August 30, 2019 - 11:48 am: Edit

Been thinking on the map. If ever this worthy project gets done, it would be a really nice feature of a computerized version of this game if the color of a territory changed with its designation.

For example, a "disrupted province" might be a light red, a "captured" province would be a light shade of the capturing empire (say, light gray for Klingons), a "long term captured" Province would be a darker shade of the capturing empire, and an annexed province would be the same shade as the owning empire.

Just use a drop down menu or some other click-control to change the ownership of the province, and then the color changes automatically.

Would be handy/ fun when doing an overview-level look at the map.

By Ted Fay (Catwhoeatsphoto) on Friday, August 30, 2019 - 11:50 am: Edit

I know Richard has his health issues (particularly with eyes), so I know this project is on hold indefinitely (unless someone else has taken up the standard).

However, I will make myself available to do some data entry if someone creates a data structure that they know they want.

I'm not a programmer, nor will I be a programmer. I decline to spend the time needed to learn programming properly, so I won't help on that end - but I will be willing to donate some hours to doing data entry drudgery.

Just FYI, though I've talked with Richard and indicated my data entry support to him directly.

Health to you Richard!

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Friday, August 30, 2019 - 12:46 pm: Edit

Thank you. Yes, color coding or some such to indicate disrupted, captured, annexed provinces and so on would be something that I would wish to do.

By Ken Kazinski (Kjkazinski) on Monday, September 02, 2019 - 06:21 pm: Edit

I know that this project has started and stopped with a number if individuals trying to complete the project.

Is there a group of people that might want to work on this project? As this is such a big project people seem to get overwhelmed by the amount of data and code that needs to be accomplished. It seems that people start and then work or home seem to cause the project to sputter.

I would be willing to create a GIT repository on GIT hub that could be used for effort. Make a couple of people admins so the project continues on.

I keep up on the MegaMek (BattleTech) project. There is a small but dedicated group making updates and the project keeps moving. I was thinking this would be the way to go.

If people are interested let me know.

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Monday, September 02, 2019 - 06:41 pm: Edit

I'd want to keep control of my project more or less so wouldn't want to do that really, at least at this time (or whenever I get back to it, more precisely).

By Chuck Strong (Raider) on Monday, September 02, 2019 - 08:26 pm: Edit

I would be interested in doing this using a phased, building block approach. I have a good idea on “how” it should look and feel but I don’t have the coding skills.

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Monday, September 02, 2019 - 10:36 pm: Edit

Well, after September when I get back into town Chuck, I may be able tp work on this and would be interested in working with you where you provide the path to a phased building block approach and suggest what you want the look and feel to be like and I'll go ahead with that. Let me know if you are cool with this.

My previous works with SFU stuff via progamming include:

A text SFB damage allocation program with smart damage allocation (if you tell it you can't take a facing phaser it stops asking you to, for example) that let you save battles containing lists of sides, each consisting of lists of ships (ie battle forces) each ship being the text version of the damage for an SSD. It did not handle shields. This program maintained a database of SFB ships to use (you could make new ones as needed or copy and modify old ones) and this program could save the damage status of ships in an inprogress scnenario. It is written in C++.

Also in C++ is a program that takes a database of an SFB map with provinces, neutral zone hexes, bases, empires, offmap areas color selection for all of this and planets and capital hex markers and generates and image file showing that map, with hex boundaries, province boundaries and such. It is not hard coded for the alpha octant, one could provide a map for the Magellanic galaxy or Omega Octant. It is functional more than attractive as an artist I'm not.

I am currently programming in Java for its superior cross platform capability compared to C++.

By David C. Holst (Dholst) on Wednesday, January 01, 2020 - 11:07 am: Edit

I've had some time over the holidays, and decided to play with a game engine called "Godot" (https://godotengine.org/). I needed a project to goof around with, and decided Federation and Empire would be an interesting challenge.

After a few days, I've done the following...
- Created hexagon map of federation, including planets and borders.
- Used gimp (https://www.gimp.org/) for creating hexagons, colorized map and borders properly.
- Can zoom in and out of map
- Middle mouse button moves map within viewport.
- Placed ship counters on map (decomposed vassal fed and emp module to utilize existing counters)
- map uses godots 'tilemap' feature, allowing changing out hexagonal tiles in game (changing ownership, etc)
- Set up gitlab (https://www.gitlab.com) repository for all code. Let me know if you'd like access.

I am currently fighting a few minor bugs (resizing the map causes some challenging artifacts, but I'm thinking this will be solved in next day or so).

I haven't read through much of the content in this forum, but I was wondering if the work Im doing may be of interest to others? I don't want to derail anything, and definitely respect existing efforts.

I'll be watching this forum for a while if anyone is interested. If you want to contact me directly, feel free to reach out to my linked in account (https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidholst/). I could also set up either a slack or discord channel.

Thanks!

David