Andromedan wrote:
Paul Franz
P.S. I am the developer of SFB Online and FC Online. If you have suggestions , question, comments please feel free to post.
Is there a User's Manual? If so, some of my comments/criticisms maybe invalid.
Being an engineeer myself, Java particularly, I don't want to be too harsh, but it's I think it really needs a tutorial/demo of some sort to walk through how to start a game and run a turn. For example, it took a while just for me to figure out how to place my ship on the map. Then it was facing the wrong direction and so I tried the context menu to change facing and it warns it's already moved and do I want to move it again...but I haven't even started playing yet. Maybe a "setup" mode before advancing to game mode?
It could also use more rule enforcement or more documentation. Just in general, I wasn't sure what housekeeping I was expected to do by hand and what the system took care of.
Some "use case" walk throughs, such as:
Firing a weapon:
1) Click (can't remember the sequence of tabs) to bring up the weapons tab.
2) Select your enemy. You'll note there are no weapons to select to fire yet.
3) Open the ship display and click on a weapon, now it will show up in the weapon tab as something you can fire.
4) Click "Fire". This just indicates you've fired, but doesn't roll any dice.
5) Roll the dice and tell your opponent the damage done.
6) Your opponent now assigns damage (see Assign Damage use case).
Assign Damage:
1) Select the ship display tab.
2) Select "Start Edit Ship" (I think that's what it's called).
3) Left click (right click?, can't recall) on ship components to damage them.
4) etc, etc.
A series of use case descriptions for all the common things would be great.
Setting up for a game (lots of sub-use cases: picking ships, placing them, overlays, joining a game, setting someone to operator status, etc).
Move forward (trivial)
High energy turn (couldn't figure this out, if i used "change facing" it'd comlain when I then tried to move my ship)
Regular turn
Side slip
Allocate Damage
Fire Weapon
Allocate Energy
Accellerate/Decellerate for an impulse
Reposition shield points
Repair
Reinforce shields
Drone attack (if it hits in sub-pulse1, it seemed like it didn't know to "stick" and I had to move it along with the ship until sub-pulse 4 was over).
And other use cases, basically going down the turn sequence.
Some of those are trivial (move/sideslip = grab ship and move it). Some definitely aren't. Some handle energy use for you, some things don't (like repairing shields). Each use case description would make clear what the user needs to do and what the system does for you.
I suspect I can do everything I need to do, but it wasn't clear what I was supposed to do.
