Glorious Stars Play Aid Website - Alpha

[virtutis.umbra]

Oh, one tiny quibble with the system description graphics (which are otherwise a super-easy and intuitive view of the colony stats, BTW):



... the open circle at the end seems to indicate a small rounding error. Shouldn't 30 be three filled circles? It's the same on the player details page too. If it's not too hard to track down all the code changes required (DRY principle for the win!), it'd be clearer to users if it filled its last circle when N%10=0 rather than at N%10 > 0

[OneMadOgre]

I love that you point out the little stuff. I really do.

I used to be a professional Lego master model builder. (yes, you read that right.) When I was young and working for Lego, I built the most wonderful Lego castle theme ever for Toy Fair in NYC. Then I had to do a peer review with the other master builders, and they told me all of the things I had to change.

I hated them.

They were wrong. So very wrong. But I had to make their changes and as I did, well, the model was better. So at the tender age of 21, I had all of my ego about things I create worked out of me. And as I result, I love feedback like the stuff you gave. Thank you.

Because you won't believe me:

https://plus.google.com/photos/11274637 ... 4237628849

[virtutis.umbra]

Checked out those photos.

What. A. Badass.

[mavikfelna]

I love the website. Can I make one suggestion though, can you add the values of each of the circle sets to the left like you do for income? I have a very hard time catching the values at a glance with the circles and I would find having the most important value as a number helpful.

Thanks

[OneMadOgre]

Excellent idea, I believe I can pull that off. (I did fix the EP to not give an extra circle for a ten too.)

I'm not going to publish out to the production server this evening, I still don't have "create" down, although I do have "edit" and "delete" working. Here's a preview of what it looks like:

shipyard2.png (921.1 KiB) Viewed 9041 times

[OneMadOgre]

Sometimes my obsession with a particular part flares up and I don't work on the most valuable thing next. So I have create working for me (I want to tweak a couple of usability things before I publish it) and decided that I really wanted the ship drawings in the shipclass overview page to reflect better the type of ship they are. I broke it with a battlecruiser (as you will see in the screenshot.)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6mqtlhh110zyrb2/shipyard3.png

The pointy-haired guy I am during the work day gets mad at me for not prioritizing correctly, but he has to just accept the fact that sometimes I like to fix things that are bugging me.

[OneMadOgre]

So I don't spend time on things I'm not very good at.

If someone wanted to take the last screenshot and take a stab at coloring the DV,AS,AF,PD,CR and put out some suggestions (preferably with the Hex code) I would appreciate it.

[virtutis.umbra]

Probably need a different gun icon to represent multiples of 10 combat factors: a 1.5x size dome with a double-barrel perhaps?

For colors, my suggestion:


DV #00BF00 •••• ¤¤¤¤ PD #88DD00 •••• ¤¤¤¤
AS #BF0000 •••• ¤¤¤¤ AF #DD8800 •••• ¤¤¤¤
CR #0000BF •••• ¤¤¤¤ CC #0088DD •••• ¤¤¤¤


EDIT: PD looked a little glaring, so I toned it down a notch. Also added CC, just for completeness' sake. Mainly wanted to retain an intuitive tri-color palette that looks good against black:
Red/Orange = offense stats
Green = defense stats (dark for primary [DV], lighter for secondary [PD])
Blue = command+control stats (dark for primary [CR], lighter for secondary [CC])

FURTHER EDIT: AS #880000 actually doesn't look very good against black, so I brightened it up a bit. Which of course led me to tweak all the rest of them.

[OneMadOgre]

Shoot. Sorry, missed the tweaks on this push.

Some updates. I'm not really happy with this yet, but it's far enough along to get some additional feedback.

System Details screen plot with fleets:
http://vbam2.azurewebsites.net/System/Details2/5861

You'll see two fleets so far, one for me and one for House Phoenix. I need to refactor the main page to take advantage of some of the new code. To be honest, I'm due a refactor over a bunch of the code, and that might be where I am while I get your feedback.

I also have a working shipyard now. It comes with a caveat however. I am starting to wire in the security so that we can have some rudimentary "fog of war" where we can't see each other's ship designs and roster. To do that, I have wired the shipyard to your log in name and role.

I've been able to identify House Crayton and House Phoenix by cross-referencing the names they picked for user names with the players list here: http://vbam2.azurewebsites.net/player

Sadly, to see the shipyard right now, I need to see your user profile in my table and then tag you as a player and rename your username to your House. Once I've done that, you should be able to start putting your ship designs in. I have a bug, where if you create the ship, it will get a "red" glow behind it, just edit and save and it will correctly place it in the "blueprint" status if the design is legal. (It checks now on the client and on the server.)

So House Phoenix, House Crayton, here you go. The rest of you, I'm happy to connect you up, you just need to register and then pick a user name that I will recognize when you register so I can connect you to your role.

http://vbam2.azurewebsites.net/vbamships/

[OneMadOgre]

Known Issues:

Ship Class Create doesn't properly set class status as available if it should be.
Can't create ships via the application (yet...)
Can't create fleets via the application (yet...)
Shipyard link on the top nav still hits my homebrew work. (fix soon)
Colors on stats, are before the edit. Will be updated.
System does not check tech level to see if it's a legal level for you.

[mavikfelna]

I log in via my gmail, mavikfelna@gmail.com but I don't have any idea what my user name is I play house Far Stars

[OneMadOgre]

You should see "House Far Stars" now in the upper right and your shipyard has been activated!

[OneMadOgre]

So... I've gotten the ship create() function working. I've also tweaked the interface a bit too. I haven't published this yet however. I have the code setting up ships to be part of a fleet. To make the ship creation really work, I want to seek the shipyard(s) for the player and then build a new fleet there when a ship is created.

Here's the preview of where we are at:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fdp746qa2bpdhs4/shipyard4.png

If I get the shipyard thing working this evening still, the next thing I think I want to do is a battle simulator, where you can throw some ship classes together and see how they slug it out. Not that that is the next most important thing, I just think it would be fun to have.

[gstano]

Thank-you again. This is looking fantastic! I will get the chance to play around with this some more later today.

[OneMadOgre]

So, not exactly where I wanted to be this afternoon, but I got a bunch of the refactoring done. Because my hair is pointy and I'm not writing my unit tests like I should, I'm not sure that everything is still working, just the stuff that I checked.

Updated the map on the system detail page to show shipyards. That will eventually only show ones that "you" know about. It also shows fleets of which there are only two. Fleet 1 and Fleet 2. If you create ship classes or ships, please do. But I plan on wiping out both of those tables before we get too far along, so don't do it expecting that the data will still be there in a week. Odds are good, it will not.

Enjoy. As always, feedback most welcome. You will need to register with a Google account to get a lot of the functionality now. If people would rather have additional Identity Portal providers like Facebook or Twitter, let me know. I don't capture your stuff when you register, the site just recognizes that the identity is the same so it can connect you to a user.

Of course if I can't connect the username you pick to the House you are playing, you don't get the player role and the website isn't nearly as useful.

http://vbam2.azurewebsites.net/System/Details2/5861