New "Add Equipment" dialog

[IBBoard]

To fix a couple of tickets I've been tinkering with the "add equipment" dialog in the WinForms app. As of revision 237 we now have a new dialog with better functionality. The new functionality will also be on the "Edit" dialog, as soon as I get Visual Studio to stop erroring!

It looks like I never showed the old one in the screenshots, but here's the new one (in my custom Windows theme, before people think I've done weird and wonderful things with WarFoundry itself )



You can set absolute amounts of equipment, percentage amounts (if the equipment type allows it) or equip everyone in a single click. As you change the absolute/percentage amounts the other changes, so you can get an idea of how many actual models are getting that item when using the percentage amount (useful for Lord of the Rings)

[Frostlee]

well, this dialog seems almost nice, just few questions:

i think it miss the full list of equipmentavaliable. i mean, lets say you have a sort of "hero unit": most of such hero have a very long list of equipment, where do you plan to show it?

also a "pop up" sort of thing that shows the (optional) textual description for the equipment would be useful i think.

according to this is have made a simple mockup of what i mean:




(thx paint, the best program after minesweeper! )

[IBBoard]

Ahhhh, I've not seen a Paint mock-up for a while!

In terms of the content itself, half of it isn't actually stored in the files at the moment. It could be stored in the WarFoundry files, but it isn't an Rollcall files and isn't (as far as I know) all in Army Builder. That would make WarFoundry more comprehensive, but it would also be more likely to upset the game manufacturers (since GW didn't like descriptive text for rules).

The tabbed grouping idea is good, but I'm not sure how to work a generic system for grouping. You could define the equipment groups per game system and have an "unclassified" group, I guess. That would then mean that the other tabs would be dynamic per game system.

In terms of how it would work for characters, they'd just have a long list of equipment they could take. I hadn't expected the lists to get too long, but I guess a Warhammer champion with access to all equipment could have quite a long list.

The general purpose for the post was to see how usable people thought the interface looked, particularly the new "three selection options" section. Percentage allocations weren't common (Warhammer was always very much "all or nothing" or "up to three in a unit") but Lord of the Rings uses them.

[Frostlee]

ah, yu whish to focus on the "three aselection options for amount"?

well, actually i find them almost useful, especially if the change of one will be reflected in the change of the ohters. even in WH could be interesting to know the percentage of the unit equipped i think. i just was wondering what do you use for te "100%"? the maxium number allowed? or the size of the unit?
also if you fear that WH player do not like that you can plan (in 0.3 maybe) to add the option to show just one or both the absolute or percentage amounts. warfoundry already has an option panel to configure something, hasn't it?

for the tabbed grouping, well, after few thinking i'm not so sure it is a great idea, i just got it from the mutual exclusive group of Rollcall, i dont know if Warfoundry will be able to handle somethign like that or you plan to let the "validation plugin" to deal with equipment constaints.

[IBBoard]

Yeah, changing the % value will change the numeric value (and vice versa). I'll check in a minute, but I think the "Equip All" is the exception to the rule. I think (but even thought it was only a couple of days ago, I can't remember!) that I made selecting "equip all" leave the other boxes alone so that you could easily revert back to your old value if you changed your mind. Setting 100% automatically selects "equip all", though.

As for 100%, that's equiping all of the unit. Numbers are in absolutes (from a minimum amount to either a maximum amount or the size of the unit, whichever is smaller) and percentages are proportions of the unit size (e.g. "up to 1/3 of the unit may have bows" in Lord of the Rinds).

WarFoundry will have preferences, but for now it doesn't have a preference panel. You can still hack the preference stores by hand if you want, but you've got to know what you're doing. Preferences will be used for several things, including alternate data file loading locations.

As for exclusivity groups, they're in as part of equipment the equipment definition rather than as restrictions. The most obvious place they're available at the moment is in required equipment where you can "replace" a required item with another required item of the same exclusivity group. The exclusivity groups in non-required items probably do need checking, but that's part of the beta test - finding things like that that I may have overlooked

The tabbed grouping is probably a good idea for when there is too much equipment, as it doesn't have to be exclusivity group-based. If you just have "weapons", "armour" and "mounts" then a character can have a sword and a bow (two weapon choices) as well as armour, a shield and barding. By categorising the equipment then it makes it easier to find what you want, it just wasn't a situation I'd considered before

[snowblizz]

The tabbed grouping is probably a good idea for when there is too much equipment, as it doesn't have to be exclusivity group-based. If you just have "weapons", "armour" and "mounts" then a character can have a sword and a bow (two weapon choices) as well as armour, a shield and barding. By categorising the equipment then it makes it easier to find what you want, it just wasn't a situation I'd considered before

This. Please. Been playing around for 5 minutes and I already would like to immediately see what options are available. E.g. magic items would also benefit form categorisation. Maybe. Weapons, Armour, Arcane, Talismans etc. Also enables you to restric such items that arent' available for a certain class of unit. Magic banners for characters, except when BSB. etc etc

[IBBoard]

I'll see what I can do, although it may slip to v0.2 depending on other things

I've yet to work out quite what to do with magic items. Handling them separately would be good for Warhammer, but wouldn't work with 40K (which has special equipment as its closest equivalent) or other systems that have something that is similar-but-not-quite.

Having "magic items" as a special category for equipment and then having a special validation rule that counts points of equipment of a given type would cover the 40K situation of "up to 80pts from the armoury".

As for limiting categories in general, that would just be a general file definition thing rather than a UI thing. A UI should let you do whatever the backend lets you do, in general. It should be quite dumb in terms of additional constraints other than ensuring that user data is well formed.

I've added the new equipment UI in as tickets 150 and 151 but pencilled it in for v0.2 for now.

[snowblizz]

FWIW, 40k is moving away from "80 points form armoury". Almost all new armies just list weapons options in each unit entry. 'Cause apparently they think us gamers are idiots.

But you have a point there WHFB has quite a few categories of "equipment", mounts, mundane options, several kinds of magic items. Some of which interacts. E.g. can't have some magic & mudane armours, if you buy a magic item mount (yes there are a few) you can't get a regular one and so on.

[IBBoard]

Those extra rules for Warhammer items and the interaction with regular equipment sounds like it should be a grouping of "equipment", albeit one that has very special items. That would be entirely for the purposes of being flexible and supporting a Warhammer-like scenario, and not to support validation of Warhammer itself, though, as that would just be against GW's rules We've already got concepts of different types of armour (which may or may not be flexible enough for some situations/game systems) but I hadn't thought about identifying something as a "mount" to avoid taking multiples. I guess Mutual Exclusion (MutEx) groups would be best for that so that you can say "only allowed one from this group of items".

I hadn't realised that the limit on armoury amounts had been dropped in newer rules, but it did seem a bit arbitrary in a way.