123 replies to this topic

[p00k]

i have to say, this has become my favorite online mechlab. more attractive and legible compared to smurfys, and a lot less painful to add and remove stuff (especially loading up armor, the slider and being able to type in the # is great). the only other one i'll occasionally use is the excel one, for when people are curious what the in game "heat efficiency" number comes out to be

[Hubis]

Sorry for the recent radio silence -- work and life have conspired to keep me away from my giant stompy robots.

Just in case anyone was wondering, this has been updated to reflect the most recent patch. I'm hoping to get some time to make some more positive changes in the near future (specifically bug fixes and readability).

[Warskull]

A good start. One feature I really like in smurfy is the cost tracker. It lets me know when I can actually pull the trigger on a new mech. Perhaps you could one-up them. The main two costs I would be concerned with is the cost to modify a stock model and the how much it would cost me to apply changes to a saved build.

[MasterBLB]

2 more suggestions coming up!

1.Moving already equipped stuff with drag'n'drop.This feature would be most useful
2.In case of opened armor set dialog if I use manually type value natural spurt is to press enter to apply.Sadly,it doesn't work.Strange,as ESC works as expected.
2a.Just a detail,but visible all the time,flashing cursor would be more intuitive for users.Now if the value is deleted the cursor disappears.

[Ilxuss]

This builder looks very nice, simple and convenient.
It will probably become my favourite.

[smokefield]

i will test it later but any tool is welcomed .

good job.

[Hubis]

Warskull, on 09 February 2013 - 02:01 PM, said:

A good start. One feature I really like in smurfy is the cost tracker. It lets me know when I can actually pull the trigger on a new mech. Perhaps you could one-up them. The main two costs I would be concerned with is the cost to modify a stock model and the how much it would cost me to apply changes to a saved build.

Yeah, this is something I've just put off because all the cost data isn't actually included in the game XML (it's all server side).

MasterBLB, on 10 February 2013 - 03:57 AM, said:

2 more suggestions coming up!

1.Moving already equipped stuff with drag'n'drop.This feature would be most useful
2.In case of opened armor set dialog if I use manually type value natural spurt is to press enter to apply.Sadly,it doesn't work.Strange,as ESC works as expected.
2a.Just a detail,but visible all the time,flashing cursor would be more intuitive for users.Now if the value is deleted the cursor disappears.

By cursor, you mean the highlighting of the selected item?

[MasterBLB]

No,just a standard text cursor.When you click on an armor value you often see no text cursor,though the text is ready to be edited.

Edited by MasterBLB, 12 February 2013 - 10:49 AM.

[Hubis]

OK, I sat down and started doing some UI clean-up. I've finally decided to just punt on getting font rendering working in every different browser for now, so I dropped down to using base fonts. It's less fancy, but probably easier for everyone to read

There have also been some other changes, such as making the hard points at the bottom of each component easier to read and making text a little easier to read in general. There's also now "landing" page at the base URL that gives general info, such as a timestamp on the when the game database was last updated. I changed font sizes and a few other basic layout values, so please let me know if I've got line breaks/overflow anywhere they're not supposed to be as a result.

[MasterBLB]

Excellent changes!I'm glad my advices weren't for nothing.
I have another one - please consider to use font color for marking ballistic,energy and missile slots,not font background.

[Hubis]

Yep. Believe me, they're all in the queue, I'm just starting with the easiest ones first

Stuff for skills and modules is like 70% done, I just need to hook it to the rest of the systems.

[Ender Targaryen]

Awesome tool! I haven't bothered looking at any others since I found this one. I thought about something similar, but I hate javascript and ajax, so not really an option unless people wanted a Windows GUI.

Is there a section where the heat matches up with the heat efficiency on the actual screen?

Once again, thanks for the tool.

[Hubis]

I did a hot-fix that repaired a bug with uploading builds. More features/layout tweaks later this week.

Ender Targaryen, on 16 February 2013 - 07:17 PM, said:

Awesome tool! I haven't bothered looking at any others since I found this one. I thought about something similar, but I hate javascript and ajax, so not really an option unless people wanted a Windows GUI.

Is there a section where the heat matches up with the heat efficiency on the actual screen?

Once again, thanks for the tool.

No syncing with the in-game heat efficiency calculation, as I've been unable to derive how it's actually calculated.

[Hubis]

Updated to incorporate the new mechs and traits, as well as rolling in feature/layout changes as I get them working.

[p00k]

Hubis, on 18 February 2013 - 08:24 AM, said:

No syncing with the in-game heat efficiency calculation, as I've been unable to derive how it's actually calculated.

forumla is something like HE = ## * sqrt ( totalheatsinks / totalhps )

only, not quite. the totalhps can be off, depending on the weapon

it seems to hold true for small and medium lasers, but a lot of other weapons the calculation seems to use 3/4 of the weapon's supposed hps, and some things like large lasers it seems to be some other arbitrary fraction of hps

edit: rummaged around 3rdworld's excel mechlab thread http://mwomercs.com/...92-updated-207/

3rdworld, on 21 November 2012 - 01:57 PM, said:

.61*SQRT(HS/HPS)

and back in november, the hps modifier was...

3rdworld, on 28 November 2012 - 08:06 AM, said:

• PPC & ERPPC decreased by 25%
  
• SPL & LPL decreased by 8%
  
• MPL decreased by 6.5%
  
• LL decreased by 2.5%
  
• ERLL decreased by 1.5%
  
• Ballistics & Missiles decreased by 25%

i think some of those numbers have changed, overall point though being there seems to be some arbitrary "discount" for some of the weapons as far as what % of their true hps gets factored into the heat efficiency calculation. go figure.

Edited by p00k, 19 February 2013 - 11:51 PM.

[Elizander]

Love the new look and interface! Great job! And freebump!

Edit:

Woohoo, it works! I tried making my 400XL Pretty Baby Build on it!

Edited by Elizander, 20 February 2013 - 07:41 AM.

[Hubis]

OK, I just pushed another update live, with some major revisions. The layout is much more compact around the mech components, and I've tried to improve readability and consistency where I can. In addition to the general layout changes:

Skills
The Skills tab is just a placeholder, reflecting my parsing data out of the XML files and formatting it for presentation. They aren't hooked to anything on the backend at the moment.

Modules
Modules can now be equipped and saved as part of a build. I'm listing ALL modules in the XML, not just the modules that are available in the mechlab.

Ammo Count
By popular demand, I'm now counting all the types of ammo equipped on a mech and displaying it on the loadout view

Build Tools/Shortcuts
On the menu, there is a "Tools" item that has some shortcuts for putting together builds. "Strip Equipment" and "Strip Armor" remove all the equipment and armor on a mech (respectively); "Max Armor" tries to fill any free weight by adding armor, prioritizing Head, Center Torso, Side Torsos, and finally Legs/Arms.

Error Handling
I've added some error-catching code to detect when a bad build is loaded/a bad link is used.

[MasterBLB]

New add-ons are really nice!Excellent work Hubis.

But I have to report a bug - font used to display armor values is unreadable,especially when it contains digit 6 or 9
Another one - use armor set dialog to completely delete armor value,then press enter.You'll see now NaN value,which must be manually overwritten by typing something,the slide bar doesn't work.

[Hubis]

Hmm, could you get a screenshot of it being unreadable? It looks fine for me, but and that should be as basic of a font as is possible.

[MasterBLB]

Sure.
I think the easiest fix is to increase font size by 2 points.