Stomp, on 15 January 2014 - 03:01 PM, said:
It looks really good so far! You guys have made a pretty cool app! I can't wait to see how a mechlab might look! This will help me in my Battletech campaign!
A couple suggestions, because I love these apps:
1. MORE MECHS. This could be the single most useful app, if you guys added all the mechs. With more mechs, + the ability to change their loadouts, means that this will be soooo useful in planning a mech build in MWO! Plus, you could add a checkbox that could apply BT rules like split crits to allow builds only capable in Battletech, like on the King Crab.
2. MORE EVERYTHING ELSE. Vehicles, Aerospace, Dropships, EVERYTHING.
I'd have donated, but I am broke haha. After I get my financial aid you can count on a donation! This app is really awesome!
EDIT: As an aside, you guys should look at Skunkwerks, they've created an awesome computer program that allows for most of what I mentioned, but they don't have vehicles and aerospace either. I know creators get touchy about sharing credit with their work, but collaboration between groups can't be all bad. They definitely know Battletech. I use Skunkwerks currently to build NPC mechs and vehicles for my players to fight against!
Thanks!
Currently, Mercpedia is built for use with Mechwarrior Online and reads the game files to build out content. Because mechs outside of MWO have not been aded, it would require either reworking the base code or creating XML files for everything currently in the table top.
While I'm not entirely opposed to this (in some cases it's actually easier), it's still a lot of extra time on top of building the mech lab.
We're currently migrating to an entirely different system that is much more visual, but it's taking a lot longer than expected, partially due to a bug that I'm trying to figure out.
I'll consider building a standalone mobile app, similar to SARNA though. I figure if SARNA can exist, so can a similar mobile app. I can't promise a mech lab for that though.
We have no problem collaborating with other teams, but we usually have different design philosophies. For example, we use XML for reading/saving data, but others use JSON. We can, of course, parse this data as needed, but that requires more time. And keep in mind that all of us do this in our spare time. Donations are nice, but at the most allow us to take a single day off of work for every donation to date. Certainly nothing close to quitting our day jobs.
Ultimately, we still need to work on this when and where we can find the time. So writing an extra parser isn't high up on the list.
28
.
