123 replies to this topic

[Hubis]

So there are already a few MechLab tools floating around with various capabilities and features; however, I figured that since I put the work into mine I might as well share it with the community at large and see get a broader feedback base. So I give you...

The Mechromancer: http://mechromancer.wordoflowtax.com/

The interface should be pretty straightforward, but please let me know if you have any problems or suggestions, or find any bugs that I can fix in future revisions.

Thanks, and good hunting!

[Spectre999]

Nice effort man.
I especially like the way you handle armor allocation and the stats tab.

You may want to work on the layout a little bit. First of all, it may be a good idea to place the actual mech in the very center of the screen - on my monitor it goes waaay to the right.
Another thing you may consider is arranging modules, weapons etc. in columns, not rows.

It may not be a bad idea to copy the game's layout, maybe use similar color coding and icons to what is used in the game for added familiarity (it's slightly confusing in the mechronomicon where you use red for missile slots).

Sometimes the clicks do not connect, I tried many times to toggle ferro fibrous, but all I did was select the text (you may want to disable that by the way).

Is it possible to add drag and drop, cause it would be heavan.

You can look for smurfy's site for inspiration:
http://mwo.smurfy-net.de/mechlab

A quick question though, where did you get the spider stats from? They look probable, but I couldn't find any reference for it.

Edited by Spectre999, 12 January 2013 - 10:43 AM.

[MasterBLB]

I'll write something more later on,but for now:
- there is no drag'n'drop support during equip.
- I like your mechlab suits perfectly on 1024x768 screen,but currently it lack support other resolutions.It'd be very welcomed if all elements would scale with resolution.

Overall,a great work.As a GUI programmer I have to say - almost perfect work Hubis, just a little improvements and your lab will be the best one available.

Edited by MasterBLB, 12 January 2013 - 10:55 AM.

[Seth]

This certainly looks like the best looking Mech Lab outside of the game I have seen so far. It looks like your heat sinks are set at .2 heat/s instead of .14 heat/s. Will you also be adding support for Pilot Trees and modules?

[Thawk]

Would be nice if the only Ammo available were weapons that you had equipped. I like your DPS chart.

[Seth]

I did some digging, and it turns out that double heat sinks inside the engine are in fact true double heat sinks, while external ones are the less efficient 1.4x heat sinks. Good to know!

[White Bear 84]

Good work on this mate, nice and easy to use!

One change would be good - Ability to clear all items, or once you have removed an item, the item immediately below is selected so you dont have to keep selecting..

Edited by White Bear 84, 13 January 2013 - 08:14 PM.

[RenegadeMaster]

It is so refreshing to find a solid web based mech lab - This is great!

One comment: The damage chart is super spiffy, although if I equip a mech with 1-2 AC2s and at least one laser (i.e. MLs) it has a sharp jump on the DPS for all but the @1s time, which doesn't quite make sense to me.

This is ultra convenient when I don't feel like downloading a Java applet or an Excel spreadsheet that only works with Office 2012.

[Elizander]

One nifty feature that you can add that will help people manage their DPS and heat would be to allow people to select weapon groups that they place on their mech and it will automatically calculate Alpha Strike Damage, Damage per Second, and Heat per Second and Modified Heat per Second (HPS with SHS/DHS cooling calculated in along with movement heat or map heat if possible) of that weapon group. Perhaps add a tab for weapon groups somewhere for this so that those who create mechs can see how effective their weapon groups are before they go play a game.

I normally use these variables in Ohmwrecker's excel sheet which I modified with additional formulas so that I know if a mech I make is heat efficient and does decent DPS. 7%-8% HPS seems to be the sweet spot for me after heat sinks but it might be different for other people with different play styles.

Anyway, it's just a suggestion that can make the lab you created have more utility than even the in-game one. People can also have hard data on what HPS/DPS values are good for them which will make building an effective mech more tangible to most beginners since they will have target DPS/HPS values to aim for when customizing with all the different weapons.

[Sgt Stress]

Really like the look of this one. As an added bonus these seems to work properly on my Android tablet too ! Couldnt get mwo.smurfy-net.de to work on it. Top job

[Hubis]

Thanks for the feedback so far, guys. This will be under heavy development as spare time and inspiration allows, so I will update it when I get major revisions in (some of which I just dropped, and some of which are enroute). One thing I will need to do is put together a user guide, as there are some features that probably aren't obvious at first.

I've recently updated it to improve some UI elements and network performance. I've also eliminated the "Engines as Equipment" approach, in favor of having a permanent "engine" item which you can modify by clicking on it. This should both be more straightforward and better for touch/tablet users.

Spectre999, on 12 January 2013 - 10:40 AM, said:

Nice effort man.
I especially like the way you handle armor allocation and the stats tab.

You may want to work on the layout a little bit. First of all, it may be a good idea to place the actual mech in the very center of the screen - on my monitor it goes waaay to the right.
Another thing you may consider is arranging modules, weapons etc. in columns, not rows.

It may not be a bad idea to copy the game's layout, maybe use similar color coding and icons to what is used in the game for added familiarity (it's slightly confusing in the mechronomicon where you use red for missile slots).

Sometimes the clicks do not connect, I tried many times to toggle ferro fibrous, but all I did was select the text (you may want to disable that by the way).

Is it possible to add drag and drop, cause it would be heavan.

You can look for smurfy's site for inspiration:
http://mwo.smurfy-net.de/mechlab

A quick question though, where did you get the spider stats from? They look probable, but I couldn't find any reference for it.

Drag&Drop is definitely in the works -- it's not that hard to do, other things have just kept bumping it in priority.

I would like to find a way to put the mech in the center, if possible; I'm just trying to make the layout work so that it flows effectively regardless of browser size. Sometimes I run on a laptop and sometimes I run on a desktop, and being able to use both without having to scroll the window if possible is a big goal of mine. Layout will be getting a lot of attention shortly, however.

As for the clicks not connecting, what Browser+Version/OS are you using? This could be a compatibility problem I haven't run into yet. For reference, I primarily run on Chrome/OSX, but I'm making an effort to support Firefox and IE9 as well.

All stats are pulled from the game XML files using an automated script. This means that it will grab pre-release info like unreleased mechs, but I don't guarantee that those reflect the final properties.

MasterBLB, on 12 January 2013 - 10:52 AM, said:

I'll write something more later on,but for now:
- there is no drag'n'drop support during equip.
- I like your mechlab suits perfectly on 1024x768 screen,but currently it lack support other resolutions.It'd be very welcomed if all elements would scale with resolution.

Overall,a great work.As a GUI programmer I have to say - almost perfect work Hubis, just a little improvements and your lab will be the best one available.

Yeah -- it "scales" to other screen sizes, but the only really easy way to use that space is to increase the area available for listing equipment. I'm working on more complex layout flow in an upcoming version.

Seth, on 13 January 2013 - 12:30 AM, said:

This certainly looks like the best looking Mech Lab outside of the game I have seen so far. It looks like your heat sinks are set at .2 heat/s instead of .14 heat/s. Will you also be adding support for Pilot Trees and modules?

Pilot Trees and Modules are definitely in the works -- probably two "major revisions" away. As you noted, DHS from the engine are 0.2 h/s while DHS you add (including those that you ADD to the engine) are 0.14 h/s. These are the types of things that having a mech lab program is good for so you don't have to calculate them yourself I do think there needs to be a more obvious read-out on them, however -- I'm planning on more in-depth damage and tonnage audits eventually, as well as a system that checks for common errors/improvements.

Thawk, on 13 January 2013 - 06:35 PM, said:

Would be nice if the only Ammo available were weapons that you had equipped. I like your DPS chart.

Hmm, I'll keep that in mind. I also need to include ammo information in the stats/damage and show you the ammo/T, which will be coming soon.

White Bear 84, on 13 January 2013 - 08:13 PM, said:

Good work on this mate, nice and easy to use!

One change would be good - Ability to clear all items, or once you have removed an item, the item immediately below is selected so you dont have to keep selecting..

Yeah, I will be adding "shortcut" actions as menu items like "Max armor" or "clear items" eventually.

One quick tip: double-clicking on an equipped item removes it, which makes stripping a section a lot easier.

RenegadeMaster, on 13 January 2013 - 08:46 PM, said:

It is so refreshing to find a solid web based mech lab - This is great!

One comment: The damage chart is super spiffy, although if I equip a mech with 1-2 AC2s and at least one laser (i.e. MLs) it has a sharp jump on the DPS for all but the @1s time, which doesn't quite make sense to me.

This is ultra convenient when I don't feel like downloading a Java applet or an Excel spreadsheet that only works with Office 2012.

Yeah, this jump has to do with the "AI" changing firing strategies based on the range. The fact that there's a jump indicates that the strategy is sub-optimal up to that point, so I'll look at debugging it and further improving the firing AI (as well as giving you more feedback on % of damage each weapon is contributing at a given time/range).

Elizander, on 14 January 2013 - 03:13 AM, said:

One nifty feature that you can add that will help people manage their DPS and heat would be to allow people to select weapon groups that they place on their mech and it will automatically calculate Alpha Strike Damage, Damage per Second, and Heat per Second and Modified Heat per Second (HPS with SHS/DHS cooling calculated in along with movement heat or map heat if possible) of that weapon group. Perhaps add a tab for weapon groups somewhere for this so that those who create mechs can see how effective their weapon groups are before they go play a game.

I normally use these variables in Ohmwrecker's excel sheet which I modified with additional formulas so that I know if a mech I make is heat efficient and does decent DPS. 7%-8% HPS seems to be the sweet spot for me after heat sinks but it might be different for other people with different play styles.

Anyway, it's just a suggestion that can make the lab you created have more utility than even the in-game one. People can also have hard data on what HPS/DPS values are good for them which will make building an effective mech more tangible to most beginners since they will have target DPS/HPS values to aim for when customizing with all the different weapons.

That's a great idea, and it will be part of the above graph calculation/AI work. I have an implementation for disabling/grouping weapons before calculating the graph, but it's commented out for the moment until I figure out the best way to make it work.

Sgt Stress, on 14 January 2013 - 08:52 AM, said:

Really like the look of this one. As an added bonus these seems to work properly on my Android tablet too ! Couldnt get mwo.smurfy-net.de to work on it. Top job

Tablet compatibility is one of my key objectives, so please give me feedback on parts that may not work/may not be convenient on a touch-screen interface. As a tip: one feature I added specifically for tablet users was that clicking/tapping the armor numbers for a component will open a popup that lets you quickly dial in the armor using either numeric input or a slider rather than the buttons on the main screen.

[Hammerhai]

Tried it but found it confusing. Could not establish where the hardpoints of the different types are. That is the only feedback I can give as I did not get very far.

[MustrumRidcully]

Wonder what the export function does:

STK-3F - MR-ASRM4ML

Neat. I like the statistics pages. There's still a lot of potential in there, what would be nice:
1) Being able to select weapon groupings to see how they affect DPS and sustainable damage.
2) The grap calculating not just based on DPS/HPS values, but actually calculating how many shots a weapon will have fired by the time frame. (This can give some interesting results).

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 15 January 2013 - 05:37 AM.

[Spectre999]

Quote

As for the clicks not connecting, what Browser+Version/OS are you using? This could be a compatibility problem I haven't run into yet. For reference, I primarily run on Chrome/OSX, but I'm making an effort to support Firefox and IE9 as well.

Win XP and Opera 12.11
It got better in the latest version, but very often clicking the buttons in Upgrades toggle does not connect for me (they usually work after a few clicks).

Quote

Tried it but found it confusing. Could not establish where the hardpoints of the different types are. That is the only feedback I can give as I did not get very far.

Had the same problem myself, even though the harpoint location lights up after choosing a weapon, you may want to consider color coding the hardpoints. It's useful when you choose a mech model you're not yet familiar with and just want to see what's there.

Overall, The layout is getting better and better. Not sure if it is an issue with my widescreen (1920x 1080), but the weapons seems to take up a lot of space (3/5 of the screen's width) which makes it look messy.

I also think mech name and model would work better in the upper left corner, right above the New/Export/Import buttons - to me it's the first bit of information I usually look for and tucking it away to the upper right corner doesn't feel intuitive.

Edited by Spectre999, 15 January 2013 - 05:44 AM.

[Hubis]

OK, big update last night

• Drag and Drop equipping
  
• Some layout improvements (Equipment now on the right, flows to the bottom depending on window width)
  
• First pass at detailed info when you select equipment

Hammerhai, on 14 January 2013 - 11:40 PM, said:

Tried it but found it confusing. Could not establish where the hardpoints of the different types are. That is the only feedback I can give as I did not get very far.

The hardpoint types are listed below the sections (the B/E/M/AMS counts). I will consider improving this when I get a chance.

MustrumRidcully, on 15 January 2013 - 05:20 AM, said:

Wonder what the export function does:

STK-3F - MR-ASRM4ML

Neat. I like the statistics pages. There's still a lot of potential in there, what would be nice:
1) Being able to select weapon groupings to see how they affect DPS and sustainable damage.
2) The grap calculating not just based on DPS/HPS values, but actually calculating how many shots a weapon will have fired by the time frame. (This can give some interesting results).

The graph actually is calculated by the individual shots rather than average DPS/HPS -- it fully simulates firing multiple weapons, taking into account duration and cooldown. I simply show DPS because it's the easiest to visualize on a single graph. I will try to add more detailed information (# of shots at time t, % of damage from each weapon/group at time/range) when I revisit the damage charts.

Spectre999, on 15 January 2013 - 05:43 AM, said:

Win XP and Opera 12.11
It got better in the latest version, but very often clicking the buttons in Upgrades toggle does not connect for me (they usually work after a few clicks).

OK -- Opera has gotten very little test coverage from me, so that's not surprising. Unfortunately it sounds like this might be a problem with the underlying UI layer (jQueryUI), but I will try to give that a further look.

Quote

Had the same problem myself, even though the harpoint location lights up after choosing a weapon, you may want to consider color coding the hardpoints. It's useful when you choose a mech model you're not yet familiar with and just want to see what's there.

Overall, The layout is getting better and better. Not sure if it is an issue with my widescreen (1920x 1080), but the weapons seems to take up a lot of space (3/5 of the screen's width) which makes it look messy.

I also think mech name and model would work better in the upper left corner, right above the New/Export/Import buttons - to me it's the first bit of information I usually look for and tucking it away to the upper right corner doesn't feel intuitive.

Yeah; I packed it there because it was unused space, and I was trying to compact the UI as much as possible. I will take that into account though, and continue working on it.

[Hubis]

FYI, I am doing some hosting changes right now so there may be some buggy performance/instability for the next couple of hours. Should be done soon.

[Elizander]

I think for new players, listing which weapons to fire for sustainable DPS / heat conservation would be a big help.

[Ethidium]

I'm thrilled with the new updates. Would it be possible to include the in game Mechlab's heat efficiency value? Also it would be nice to have the pilot lab upgrades as option (heat containment, speed tweak etc)

Edited by Ethidium, 16 January 2013 - 01:09 AM.

[Hubis]

Elizander, on 16 January 2013 - 12:18 AM, said:

I think for new players, listing which weapons to fire for sustainable DPS / heat conservation would be a big help.

Yeah. Now that I'm showing heat efficiency in the item statistics, that should help a little (until I implement the more detailed firing chart).

Ethidium, on 16 January 2013 - 01:06 AM, said:

I'm thrilled with the new updates. Would it be possible to include the in game Mechlab's heat efficiency value? Also it would be nice to have the pilot lab upgrades as option (heat containment, speed tweak etc)

I'm not 100% sure how the game's heat efficiency is calculated -- if anyone knows, I can look into adding it.

[Jukebox1986]

Nice tool, thanks for the effort!