Equipment brainstorming

[snowblizz]

just a little quite OT question:
i have noticed that at least one equipment is needed for each unit (from the race.xsd).
but what about unit not carring anything? think about beasts in WH (high elves great hawks) or other game systems (warmaster is the one in which i spotted this question)...
it should be easy a little fix for such unit i think.

Way ahead of you there dude!
It's been reported and according to the WF site, fixed.
http://dev.ibboard.co.uk/projects/warfoundry/ticket/194

[IBBoard]

Already caught by Snowblizz, patched and in our fixed but not released list (ticket 194)

[Frostlee]

oh, damn, i've been not here for too much time maybe!

[IBBoard]

It was reported and fixed about two weeks ago, so yeah, you've not been here for a little while

[IBBoard]

I'm currently in the middle of an overhaul of the equipment (triggered by adding the equipment slots) that'll break existing data files but which should be far more sensible and flexible for the future.

Basically, rather than having minNum/maxNum/minPercentage/maxPercentage/roundNumberUp all defined on one UnitEquipmentItem we're going to have "minLimit" and "maxLimit" tags that contain one of the limit type tags, which relate to the IBBoard.Limits that I've been adding for use with the slots.

Sorry for the breakage - I'll try to avoid it between release versions, but the old way was ugly from a coding point of view and making the old way provide data for the new way was a bit too awkward.

[snowblizz]

Considering we're at a 0.1c Beta... I think breaking the datafiles is the smaller evil. IMNSHO.
I was pretty much stuck anyway on the files as it was waiting for some way to incorporate the more complex circumstances.

[IBBoard]

That was what I thought - we've not even hit the first full release yet and we've got a few data files but not many I had always thought that the old method of defining both a min/max number and a min/max percentage and ignoring one of them if the other was set was ugly, but it worked and I just went with it. Now that I've got a better method in the works I'll try to think more in future so that "looks ugly" leads to "must find better way" rather than "oh well, it'll do for now"

[Frostlee]

i think that the beta should be used to find this kind of fixes. if this will lead to better coding i have no proble in trhowing away all of my datafiles (actually i think we just need to fix few lines...).
anyway. please explain a little better the use of this limit tags, i'm not sure how to use them.
it is quite obvious fo the <percentageLimit> and the <unlimitedLimit> (i actually don't understand why it has attributes anyway...), but how the others works?
a little example could explain better than thousands words...

[IBBoard]

I've just done the big breaking commit for the API and need to test out and fix the UI side now. Hopefully it'll be done in the next day or two and I can give it to you guys to break. As for explaining it, I'll do that soon, once it is all actually working

[IBBoard]

Everything should now be in the API now for the new limits. All I need to do is use it in the UI so that the equipment selection uses the new limits correctly and make sure that files are being loaded correctly (plus explain the new limits).

We may have a new beta version with this new feature by tomorrow or Friday at this rate. I had hoped to do it sooner, but I'm not all that great at judging how long it'll take me to code stuff

[snowblizz]

Where do we stand with points limits on equipment choices?

It was mentioned, but I wanted to put it forward again, as that's tied quite closely with equipment slots. Would it be possible to just make an additional tag (without breakign anything) tag so that I can say that equipmentslot="Deamonicgifts" maxTotalpoints="50" ? This is the other major way equipment is limited, especially for WHFB.

[IBBoard]

There's nothing in there yet, but that would be one way of handling it. It's a slightly different mechanism to everything I've been handling at the moment, though, so it won't just be a case of taking what we have for size limits and re-using it as-is.

[snowblizz]

There's nothing in there yet, but that would be one way of handling it. It's a slightly different mechanism to everything I've been handling at the moment, though, so it won't just be a case of taking what we have for size limits and re-using it as-is.

I guess it was too optimistic to think it would be easy, it never is.
But since you already have a <minlimit> and <maxLimit> it sorta makes sense to just make a core:pointlimit tag. Obviously you need a variable to hold the sum of points.

I'm just saying that in my not-techie world it seems simple enough. I'm warning you, I've bullied programmers to do my bidding before.

[IBBoard]

That would be one way of doing it, but the problem is that the current limits are all about numbers, not points values (they're actually generic objects in my "IBBoard" project rather than any of the "IBBoard.WarFoundry...." projects). Also, using min/max limits for points as well would restrict you when you want to limit the number as well (e.g. "no more than three items totalling more than 50 pts").

I think I'll leave equipment as it is for now in v0.1 (but fix any bugs), focus on the other tickets tagged for v0.1 and add that as a feature request for v0.2.