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Topic Summary

Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: October 01, 2009, 10:48:28 PM »

Previously when you selected a cap maintenance category you had to then manually select an actual cap before being able to enter a number for its level. The list now defaults to the first cap shown and shows its level information automatically. No further action is required if that is the cap you want!
Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: October 01, 2009, 10:21:01 PM »

Engine caps were showing up on army and air template cap choices.

The Rapid Fire cap has been added to the ground template caps under IUU(industrial Unit) maintenance.

A bug was squished in the basic fuel maintenance subroutine.
Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: September 28, 2009, 10:59:44 PM »

missile DP has been rethought and it has been recalculated for all warships.

A bug in the code for reducer caps has been found and corrected. Darned copy and pasting!
Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: September 07, 2009, 10:04:12 PM »

Gavin found bugs in the Externals and we took care of them. However, we now need to add bases to the unit maker, and maybe Teams as well. This should be rather easy as most everything is now in place. The fun part may be the Production Point costs, but we will cover that when we come to it.
Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: September 05, 2009, 10:47:04 PM »

Unit Be and base PP can now be effected through caps.  Point in case are the Armored Recovery Units cap and the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital caps.

Light carriers (CVL) have been added to the Naval templates and Cargo capacity changes have been incorporated through out all the Naval templates.
Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: August 29, 2009, 10:50:17 PM »

Mash, ARU, and AI caps need additional work as I missed the effects on Be(personnel) and we will be adding an ability to adjust the base production points of a unit. Other then that it seems to be working well.   Simple units may still have difficulty with their caps files as I have not been able to comb through them yet.

We have two unit template types left. Bases and Teams. Lol, but the end is in sight as most cap combos are now taken care of and adding two new unit templates should be fairly easy.

Hopefully we will have this baby put to rest by the end of next Saturday!

I hope Ken can put up with my fluent french while I build the install for it!
Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: August 28, 2009, 11:27:09 PM »

Okay, we have finished the last of the  programming for the caps. Hurray! Now we need to do a LOT of data entry for the unit templates. And test for bugs! We may redesign the cap templates so that they hold more info and are even easier to mod, but that will have to wait.
Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: August 24, 2009, 09:24:36 PM »

Specialized missile templates have been added and the missile check box now has working code attached!

Until just recently the Reducer Caps(caps that reduce the cost of the unit by giving it a negative something) only had the cap level being used to lower the PP cost.  For instance, we have a reducer cap that reduces the Cargo Capacity of the unit and reduces the cost of the unit appropriately. Now it actually programmaticaly reduces the CC during the 'has the user changed anything" check. Naturally, the subroutine is the last one run as it is the final modifier to the templates stats!

We are getting close to seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on this.Now that the reducers are done, we need to go back and fix the effects of 5 caps that have not been able to be fitted into a convenient cubby hole. After that all we have to do is enter the simple templates from the air and naval and then add in accurate caps for them. Basically data entry! Lol, they will just have to live with copies of the complex caps for now!

The idea was to create a modifiable program that could have its data changed to fit into a specialized campaign for additional flavor and I believe that we have nearly done so. The BTS! game is similar in idea to GURPS in that you can create any genre in it and then play it. It is not a RPG, but we have ideas for that as well.

Questions anyone? :D
Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: August 24, 2009, 09:19:27 PM »

Reducer caps are now programmatically working. That just leaves 5 or 6 odd balls that will require some thought. I am loathe to hard code these caps in, so need to find a way to mod them in.
Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: August 14, 2009, 10:41:50 PM »

Quote from: "Haegan2005"
Code has been added to load air units, handle their Cargo capacity, deck points for airships, and the complex caps and unit templates are done for Complex Air units. Complex air units are choppers, transports, shuttles, fighter to bomber types, and blimps(airships). This also includes interplanetary probes and satellites.

Needless to say, this template file for the complex air units is the biggest yet.

It also has some of the most specific code as well. There are two different ways to calc Cargo Capacity as well as specialist templates for missiles and Awacs craft. Both of which require special coding to handle costs and how caps effect them. The Awacs code is done, but the missile code is waiting for us to see how it should fit together.

Onward!
Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: August 14, 2009, 10:36:37 PM »

Code has been added to load air units, handle their Cargo capacity, deck points for airships, and the complex caps and unit templates are done for Complex Air units. Complex air units are choppers, transports, shuttles, fighter to bomber types, and blimps(airships). This also includes interplanetary probes and satellites.

Needless to say, this template file for the complex air units is the biggest yet.

It also has some of the most specific code as well. There are two different ways to calc Cargo Capacity as well as specialist templates for missiles and Awacs craft. Both of which require special coding to handle costs and how caps effect them.

Onward!
Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: August 08, 2009, 11:27:05 PM »

Joined: 06 Oct 2008
Posts: 182

   
Okay, we have the complex air templates typed in and working. The program will also change the stars for DR to GA and AM to EW for naval and ship templates when you are going back and forth. The printouts for them have not been fixed yet.

A check box has been placed to allow a aircraft to be marked as a sensors aircraft and it adds half the base PP to the PP total.

A check box has been placed to mark a unit as a missile. The stats will be added to the 2nd GA value in this case instead of all of them.

The CC switching for the two forms of CC calc for air units has been entered as well and placed in the complex air templates as well as has had a subroutine looking for it as well.

Things to do for air units.

finish the Complex Air caps.
Enter the Simple Air templates
do the Simple air caps
Enter coding for the missiles (have to wait on ken for this.)
I need to add in code to act off of the reducing caps. right now they only effect PP and WU costs.

In addition we have the following programming to do:

Addd in code to zero out the AR's for a sub before adding in the caps adj. Will lIkley have to run a search once through all combo boxes for 'submersible.' first, then run the rest of the code for stats adjustment.

I also need to do the simple army caps. The army is using a copy of the Complex army caps as a place holder.

I am wanting to add teams in as well, but that is taking a back seat right now.

Even once the program is up and running i have several hours of data entry! The net result should be a modable program that players can alter to make their own universes units within the BTS! rule sets. We have been able to make  star wars and units from our stories using this program and we expect it to only get better as tweaking and time allows.
Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: July 25, 2009, 12:00:36 AM »

Light Cruiser: CR: 3, 10000CC
138wu /144pp /1BE 16 mos prod time
Industrial Upkeep: 0.1, Wealth Upkeep: 0.1, Fuel Upkeep: 0.8
AR 4/4 DR 3/2 AM 2/2 10 PP
TL 8, +1 System Drive Reaction: Chemical Cyrogenic, +4 Sensors, +4 Weapons
Deck Capacity of 1 Aircraft Squadrons
DPs may only be used for aviation type of aircraft


After Stats fixes: (The AR has been modified by the weapons cap.)

Light Cruiser: CR: 3, 10000CC
138wu /144pp /1BE 16 mos prod time
Industrial Upkeep: 0.1, Wealth Upkeep: 0.1, Fuel Upkeep: 0.8
AR 8/8 DR 3/2 AM 2/2 10 PP
TL 8, +4 Sensors, +4 Energy Weapons, +1 System Drive Reaction: Chemical Cyrogenic
Deck Capacity of 1 Aircraft Squadrons
DPs may only be used for aviation type of aircraft


This the light cruiser capped out with all four caps used and the free engine slot used as well. No External caps have been used as they are even more maintenance intensive.

Light Cruiser:  CR: 3,  10000CC
154wu /176pp /1BE   20 mos prod time
Industrial Upkeep: 0.1, Wealth Upkeep: 0.1, Fuel Upkeep: 1.1
AR 8/8 DR 7/6 AM 6/6 10 PP
TL 8, +4 Sensors, +4 Energy Weapons, +1 System Drive Reaction: Chemical Cyrogenic, +4 Shields, +4 Armor
Deck Capacity of 1 Aircraft Squadrons
DPs may only be used for aviation type of aircraft


The Fuel maintenance is horrifically expensive(becomes an 11 if undergoing training or war time circumstances) but the ship is potentially far more effective then its less capped sister above. It also takes much more production points to make(176 vs 144) and more wealth units to pay for(154 vs 138). This does not count production time either(20 vs 16 months each.) The highly capped cruiser is beyond my industries ability to make, even if I pay for overtime which doubles my available Production Points in space. Though if it was a wet naval ship I could do it barely (89 *2 = 178).
Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: July 21, 2009, 01:16:43 AM »

All of the current naval caps are now entered and accounted for in Maintenance. I had forgotten about a few that required maintenance from multiple categories and one in particular(Fast) that doubles the Fuel Maintenance after everything else has been added in. As of now, any cap should be able to be added or modded to fit into one of the existing ways of adding to maintenance.

I will be leaving the simple navy, ground, and air unit templates and Caps alone for now. The templates wil be copies of their Complex cousins.

Our testing is currently around tech level 8.5, which would be about year 2030 for real life. This means that we are trying hard to push out the ability to make Complex units with relative ease with the Unit Maker as that will be a significant time saver when making units for new powers and Non-Player powers.

I have two goals for this upcoming weekend. Get the Complex ground Caps source files finished and program in how the Caps effect the Attack Ratings(AR), Defense Ratings(DR), and Armor (AM) for the chosen templates.

Once this is done we will be needing to add in the effects of certain caps like Compact and Silos as this effects the CC and DP of the units they are on respectively. Also, the Reducers(its like a negative Cap) need to have their effects programed in as well. I will also need to add in coding to prevent a Reducer from being chosen more then once. This should not be hard, but will still require time to do.

The more I do this, the more I respect Steves skills and willingness to step through code and debug it. It can be time
consuming and frustrating to boot! But the payoff when it does what you want it to do!!! Well, that mostly makes it worth the hair pulling, cursing, and general french speaking that I go through when I fix something while breaking somethhing else. Darned order of operations is so picky...  

Ok, my rant is done.
Posted by: Haegan2005
« on: July 21, 2009, 12:56:12 AM »

The coding has been added to load simple and complex army units and the Complex army template file is now done. The Production point cost subroutine needs to be modified to allow the army units to have proper costs. The naval and army formulas are different and I need to put in a check to see which one needs to be used!

The Simple Army templates are not as numerous as the Complex, Thank god! Tight now the Simple units template file is a copy of the complex template file.

caps files need to be done for both simple and complex army units. They are curently copies of Naval caps and as such give odd caps(like torpedoes and docking collars!!!).