Thursday, May 31, 2007

CWVD 10.8 Finally Dusted Off

With SPARK finally about to resume dueling after an unfortunately shortened 2056 season, I've dusted off the CWVD and begun working on the next version. It features two major changes:

1. I've moved to using Office 2003 for development. Hopefully nothing bad will happen to people on older versions.

2. The revamped Weapons page is finally going to be finished. Here's two previews: More Info, Collapsed. Don't worry too much about the Spaces Available section or the whole vehicle numbers; those things aren't done yet.

The new weapon entries are bigger than I was hoping but the dual dropdowns make finding the weapon you want much easier. I thought about going to triple dropdowns (type, weapon, ammo) but that would be even harder on an already straining Excel and involve a lot of table rewriting. One thing at a time.

While going through the weapon accessories and other allowed choices I had to make some arbitrary choices over what goes where. Compare Spinal Mounting to Tracer Ammo: neither is seen that often, both could be either a Mod or an entry in the Weapons table. Which way is better? I should probably follow the existing paradigm and add xxx+Tracer entries for all of the appropriate weapons, but I think this will be less work. (In a less restricted app, you would choose ammo loads separately from weapons and these sorts of things would be mods for their related weapon/ammo entries.)

I didn't want to fill the Mods section of each weapon entry with a ton of checkboxes, so I kept it down to ones that can be used by the most weapons. Let me know what you think about my choices. (Ooo...waterproofing! Unlikely to be used since you can't make a boat with the CWVD, but it can be applied to almost every weapon... :)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Not Played Car Wars for years, but have always like the Design side of things. looked at Car Wars® Vehicle Designer v10.7.4 and was really impressed with what you have done. Cant wait to see V10.8, Thinking of sending you a an email and asking to get a sneak-look at what your upto (I like speadsheets also). Xtriaden