Wednesday, June 28, 2006

CWVD 10.7.4 Released

Another new version of the CWVD! 10.7.4 fixes a bug with the new metal spoilers and fixes the gas tank spinner not reactivating by hiding it instead. There's also some new errors and warnings to go along with the gas tank spinner change.

Enjoy the CWVD!

Monday, June 19, 2006

The CE Project: Introduction and Destiny Samples

One of my favorite games of all time is Cosmic Encounter. We played it almost every day when I was in college, and we still play it rather often ten years later. Unfortunately it's out of print and our Mayfair set is starting to wear down. While there is an online version, for my friends and I it's just not the same. ...

That will be the beginning of the page for the CE Project, where I'm following in the footsteps of many other CE fans by creating my own CE set from scratch. While I can't post the files, I plan to write up what I'm doing and how I got there as a guide for others who may be making their own CE set. I'd gladly include suggestions from others as well. (Right now I'm trying to decide how best to make tokens.)

Over the next few weeks I'll be posting samples of my redesigns for all of the different cards. I thought I'd kick it off by posting some of the color Destiny cards. I stuck to a simpler design with built-in features to prevent the "what color is this" issue with Blue and Light Blue, which we will keep using for Symbiote and six player games until I have new sets of tokens. Here's what I came up with: (click on a card for a larger version)

Blue, Normal Cone Cyan (Light Blue), Normal Cone Wild, Normal Cone

Blue, Reverse Cone Cyan (Light Blue), Reverse Cone Wild, Reverse Cone


Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet (Purple), Cyan (Light Blue), White, and blacK are all represented in my new destinies. Someday I'll dig out my Simply set and add Tan, Mint, Lavender, and Pink with their icons.

Next week: Special Destinies and more!

Sunday, June 18, 2006

CWVD 10.7.3

Another week with bug reports, another new version of the CWVD. :)

This one fixes the previously-mentioned double charge for six wheel costs, makes Junk Dropper magazines cost money, and fixes a bug with the vehicle summaries if you have a quantity in a weapon or accessory but haven't selected an item to buy. I also threw in a warning for when you go over your GE limit, but it only takes into account any restriction based on your armor.

Enjoy CWVD 10.7.3!

Tomoe and Echidna

I received Tomoe and Echidna this week, the newest hardcover Lost Worlds books from the Japanese Queen's Blade series. The art is very good but perhaps not quite as good as the first four. The hidden pictures this time are "2P" colors: a dark elf/demon for Echidna and purple and white instead of red and white for Tomoe.

Flying Buffalo hasn't made a translation available yet, but I've begun adding them to my Queen's Blade Reference Sheets, which are already available for the first four. Echidna was easy as I own a copy of Flaming Cherry; Tomoe will be more difficult as I don't own a copy of Samurai with Katana. Time to get out all of my Queen's Blade books and play match the characters! :)

Friday, June 16, 2006

Refund Notice

Last night Chris French reported a bug where the CWVD would double-charge you the $100 for a six wheel chassis if you also had an extra heavy chassis. (It took me a bit of back-and-forth to figure out the combination of factors, though.)

It's interesting because this bug is very, very old; it goes back to when I first started tinkering with the CWVD in 2001. If you have a copy of CWVD version 9.1b by Rick Cross you'll notice that it doesn't have an option for six wheels. It'll show that your car has a six wheel chassis if you put on a sixth tire, but it won't charge you the $100. Well...it doesn't charge you on the Vehicle Design page. On the hidden page with the Body, Chassis, and Suspension modifiers it adds $100 to the cost of an extra heavy chassis if you have exactly six tires.

Seeing that it "wasn't charging you for the six wheel mod", I added a check and cost addon to the Vehicle Design page. That fixed the bug if you didn't have an extra heavy chassis, but meant that from September 2001 until the next version of the CWVD comes out everyone's been overcharged $100 for those mammoth pickups, campers, and vans.

Refund forms are available at your local Uncle Albert's Auto Stop and Gunnery Shop. Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

CWVD 10.7.2

People have been reporting issues so the CWVD needed a bugfix release. This mainly fixes non-GE encumbrance; even if you turned off the Alternate Encumbrance preference it would still add the weight to your vehicle. I've fixed that but now it doesn't figure in things like backpacks or the GE loss to IBA. That'll get looked at again soon.

For now I'm concentrating on the new Weapons page. While the new double-selection method (type then weapon) makes it much easier to find the weapon you want, things could be even better. Since I was adding ammo types anyway, I decided to play with the order of some of the weapons in the weapons list. The old order is the same as the UACFH, which sorts them by weapon family and then specific weapons. This shows in the horrible ordering of the Largebores, where the first few "pages" of weaponry in the dropdown menu are either tournament illegal or rarely taken.

In 10.7.2 I sorted the Tank Guns to the top and the Blast Cannons below them. It still means that the BCs are sandwiched between a bunch of weapons you can't take in the tournament rules, but they're a lot closer to the top of the Largebores!

Ideally the CWVD would be able to filter out the equipment types you're not allowing in your game, but that's rather difficult to do in spreadsheet form. I'm already straining Excel with some of the UI tricks.

Let me know what you think of the new ordering. Also be on the lookout for errors in the weapons data with two new ammo types appearing. (It's easy to mess up a copy-paste.)

Enjoy!

Monday, June 05, 2006

Excel Corrupts...again.

::cough cough::

Welcome back! Pardon the dust, it's been a while.

Now that SJG is allowing us to actually distribute the stuff we've been working on, I've been doing more work on the CWVD. It's a very complicated spreadsheet as such things go, and Excel 97 isn't the most stable of development platforms.

A few nights ago I did a lot of work on the CWVD's new Weapons page. Before going to bed, I checked it into my source control system (Perforce). Unfortunately, when I opened it Excel crashed on opening. It opened fine on Excel 2003, so I narrowed it down to what was making Excel crashed and hopefully fixed it. I'm hoping to not have to do all of that work over, so I'd like to get some confirmation before continuing.

If you have the time, download "Build" 140F of the CWVD, open it in your version of Excel, and click the Test All Pages button. Let me know your version of Excel and whether it opens and gets through the test.

Thanks everyone!