Fun things to do with stats

[clutch110]

Alright I posted my little app on MiniWarGaming.com and I figured I would share it here. This is why it is fun to have numbers and modules that understand what to do with them. This is a little program that shows you a probability mass graph of hits given to hit, to wound, to save and total number of events.

Here is a quick screen capture of it:


It was written in Java as that is the language I work in normally. I'll probably see about making it a plugin to WarFoundry after I make it a mobile app.

Clutch

[IBBoard]

I'd thought about that kind of thing in general before. There's obviously distributions of probability of getting a certain number of wounds from a given number of hits. Having it in a graph can be quite useful. It's been a while since I've seen anyone voluntarily pick Swing as a toolkit, though!

We'd need to find some way to do it in a cross-platform manner (it might be that we have to just provide the values in a table rather than a graph, or we might be able to work it as some kind of cross-toolkit image) but having a plugin that said "how many wounds is this unit likely to cause in this situation" would be quite cool.

As for making it a mobile app, Android is probably your best target. They've already got an SDK that is part of Eclipse, so it is all Java apps. Porting to iPhones will be a PITA with Apple's latest "thou shalt not use other technologies, even if the end product is indistinguishable" rules.

[clutch110]

I don't have a problem porting the code.

As for Swing and Java, well I own a Mac laptop, I run Linux on my desktop at home and I run Windows at work. My Jar file allows me to double click and have it run anywhere.

If you would like to play around with the app check it out here.

Clutch

[IBBoard]

That is the one advantage of Swing, but it does look horrible and the last I used it then the API was a bit odd in places. I do most of my day job in Java using Eclipse and SWT. It's "cross-platform" in that you write it once in a generic way, but you need to compile binaries per-platform.

I was going to say that one of the advantages of Qt# and GTK# are that they look native on all platforms, but then I realised that they suffer from HAS (Horrible API Syndrome). Qt# is better than GTK# for an API, but GTK# is better supported. No-one seems to make a good visual toolkit with a good API!