WarFoundry versus other army builders

[IBBoard]

This is a bit of a two-part topic. One part is the comparison of "what do we do (or what we will do) that other apps don't do?". The other part of the comparison is "what do other apps do that we should do?".

Part of what I'm thinking of is something like the comparison charts on Wikipedia and that various commercial application's websites use. The other part is just to generally see what we need to aim for

So, ideas?



My initial thoughts on the "what we do" front are:

• File formats: WarFoundry, Rollcall, Army Builder (once I work it out!), The Forge (potentially - if anyone wants it)
• "Free as in beer" and "Free as in speech" (Gratis and Libre)
• Won't keep costing you as you use it (e.g. the Army Builder update license extensions)
• Native look and feel
• Won't stop working after a reinstall
• Can be installed on as many computers as you want
• File formats can be created by hand
• Extensible

My initial ideas on the "what we don't do" front are mainly on "what we don't do yet":

• Export to various templates (but that's only a matter of time)
• Full validation (I just need to re-work the validation mechanism and add a proper plugin structure)
• Unit filtering (an interesting idea, but not something I'd ever use myself)
• In-built update process for new versions (but that's just feature candy)

[IBBoard]

Just as a quick note, we've now got a wiki page for these comparisons

[SteveM]

You might want to add a comparison to The Forge. I don't know anything about it except that it exists.

[IBBoard]

I did consider some of the others (I know of one web-based one that was going to be bundled within a Qt app as well) but they're a) less important and b) less well known (at least to me, and I'm the one comparing them!)

[Dreadaxe]

Maybe add R-Community, ArmyCalc, Tabletop Commander,

[IBBoard]

I don't know much about them, but people are welcome to say how they think they compare. What I might do is keep a main page with the "big three" (Rollcall, WarFoundry and Army Builder - the old, the new and the ugly) and have a fuller comparison with all other tools that people use.