Rollcall replacement app: Progress

[IBBoard]

I'll be putting up a website at some point (I've already got the domains and have had for a while) but WarFoundry (name from this thread) has been under development for a while now.

Most of that time has been spent inactive while I work on other things, but the main app is there, you can add and remove units, undo and redo functionality are there, and you can save and load armies. There's also "game system switching" functionality, but I currently only have one game system file and only one game system type is known to work.

Once it's at a reasonable stage, WarFoundry will be released under the LGPL v2.1 (Lesser Gnu Public License, v2.1) making it open source for people to improve and continue

[gregmita]

Hi, I'm a 40k player who just discovered Rollcall and Warfoundry, and I'm wondering what the progress for Warfoundry is like now? Also, do you need any help at all with development and coding for the app? I'm quite familiar with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment since I work with it at my job. As I understand it you have two sets of code going simultaneously, one with GTK under Linux and one with .net on Windows correct?

BTW, I've also been trying out Stargrunt II (http://www.stargrunt.ca/main.htm) recently and it'll be interesting to see if Warfoundry can handle another game system like this.

[IBBoard]

I'm a bit delayed with coding at the moment, but I should be picking up again soon. As of the beginning of November I will be moving house and will be much nearer my work so I'll have more time and inclination to work on it. Thanks for the offer, though.

There has been some progress in September, despite the lack of announcement. That I can think of off the top of my head then I've now reworked the army structure a bit and the army tree includes percentages taken, or whatever the limiter is for the game system.

As it says on the site, the final app will be open source so anyone can add to it once it is finally released. For now, though, I'm writing it as my own app.

W.r.t. Linux, it's not that I have two sets of code but that there will be two GUIs. I'm writing a back-end DLL in cross-platform compatible methods (so avoiding all use of Windows-specific code such as System.Windows.Forms) and then writing GUIs that use a Model-View-Controller approach as much as possible. The GTK# GUI is very minimal at the moment and doesn't function properly, but it was an initial attempt to learn the Mono Develop IDE and see how well separated my code was from Windows.

Hopefully I'll be able to make the app support as many game systems as possible. While I can't see any mention of points values or how selection restrictions work in those games from a quick skim then I'll keep it in mind. I'll see if I can get hold of some rules to at least leave things open. The most obvious thing I can see that I'd need to add is a way to enable you to take a variety of weapons that cost some form of "capacity point" or "hard point". At the moment it uses W40K/WH weapon methodology where you take a single weapon that excludes other weapons or you take a weapon for all troops in the unit.

[gregmita]

Thanks for replying. Is the current version (or even just screenshots) available for people to see what it's like? Or is the UI pretty much like Rollcall?

wrt Other game systems - is there going to be a way where the metadata could be defined by the user, like how Army Builder or The Forge do it? For example, modifying and saving the stat categories in another file.

[IBBoard]

At the moment then the UI for the Windows version is similar to Rollcall - tree view of army, windows like the roster cards GW made and buttons to add new units. TBH I don't think there are too many ways to do the interface and be intuitive. The advantage of the way I'll code it, though, is that anyone can create their own interface if they want. If they do then I'll also gladly host it.

I have intended to put up some screenshots and some details of what was added in September, but I keep getting distracted by other tasks. I'll try to get some screenshots up by the end of the week.

I did consider releasing alpha and beta versions under a non-open source license so that only the completed project was open source, but so people could try it out. If people want to try it with little documentation on file formats then I might go ahead with that idea.

As for other game systems, the app is mainly system agnostic. As long as it has a concept of a "unit" and a points value then app should handle it.

The app itself has a more abstract notion of "game system", though. The way the "system" behaves depends on its selection type - "Percentage" (old WH), "Slots" (new WH), "Choices" (new 40K) and possibly one other that I can't think of off the top of my head. You can then make files that define the individual games as one of those types, and define what stats line the game uses.

Just to make it as flexible as possible then I'll even try to make it work without a stats line (because "without a category" doesn't make sense - you just have a single "everything" category in that instance). I'll document things a bit more as I go along.

[IBBoard]

Just as a quick update, I now have the screenshots of September's work, I've just got to upload them and add a page (which should hopefully happen on Friday).

After some discussions about good coding practice at work, I think there's a bit more reworking needed in the API as well! Can't go releasing bad code to the public

[IBBoard]

WarFoundry screenshots are now available. I've also (finally) updated the features page with September's changes. Once it gets too long then I'll move the features page to a change log.

[IBBoard]

There has been a bit more progress, but it is a backwards step as well as a forwards one.

I've been looking again at some of the other, non-GW systems and some of the features in Lone Wolf's Army Builder and so there has been a bit of a redesign. There will now be modifiers that allow you to represent campaign conditions and different W40K roster styles and be highly customisable. I'm also looking at including experience, abilities 'purchased' with experience, weapon slots (so you can say "you can take two of these or one of these or three of these" more easily) and some better structuring of the data.

The other change, from a programmer's point of view, is that I'm now writing it for the .Net 2.0 framework rather than the 1.1 framework, so there are going to be generics used. Having used them so much in my Java code at work then they're a definite boon for programmers and should simplify and clarify some of the code for when it gets released to the masses.

So, some bits need a rewrite to take into account the new structure, and the new features need writing, but the overall outcome is that the program will be more flexible and better featured.