1 hour ago, MajorJuggler said:

Definitely! Are you on our Thursday night FB page? At a minimum I'll post there once I'm ready to enter beta testing.

Yup. You beat me in your debut of cargotanni and you dropped the cargo on all 3 of my ships...

Hi,

Perhaps we can discuss that using an existing builder in order to check the effort first. I am on vacation right now and I will be back in one week. Just PM me if you are interested.

Bye

Just wanted to wish the Major luck and anyone else helping him. I seriously look forward to being able to play MJ-wing instead of FFG-wing. Keep up the great work guys!

9 hours ago, fab74 said:

Hi,

Perhaps we can discuss that using an existing builder in order to check the effort first. I am on vacation right now and I will be back in one week. Just PM me if you are interested.

Bye

Will do, the more the merrier. There's no reason we shouldn't have multiple builders supporting this. The first step would be to get Fab's squad builder to output something that's importable by vassal. Looks like the XWS output to YASB could work, although I'm not sure how that would play out with house rules with a different point structure.

I'll have to ping @Mu0n729

Fabs builder already supports xws output actually ! Listjuggler supports it as a xws over json over http endpoint.

...and XWS doesn't really care about points. It optionally has a points field for the squadron, but the spec says that this "MUST be ignored by importing applications; for human readability only."

If Fab is willing to put it in his Builder, that will make things way faster. If there's an issue with output format, those can be added really fast, like 1 day. So that looks pretty good for your project's future~

16 minutes ago, sozin said:

Fabs builder already supports xws output actually ! Listjuggler supports it as a xws over json over http endpoint.

I'll have to mess around with the builder later on my desktop, I was just poking around quickly on mobile. That's good news!

So question then, since I haven't looked into the XWS spec in detail, how is the squad point cost calculated? Based on the upgrades, or is it self-reported in the YASB url?

Also, in an ideal world, the house rules rev and point cost would still come through when you import a squad in vassal. I.e. the chat window would say something like:

199 point list 'MajorJuggler House Rules v1.01, Biggs Walks the Dogs 3.0'

Looks like you could accomplish this by forcing the house rules text into the squad description.

This seems pretty solid. Would do probably some playtesting with it myself, if possible.

Squad cost is not calculated with xws payload. The spec assumes that the receiver of the data will calculate the totals on their own. That said, it can be an optional points field on the pilot or upgrade - I have a backlog item to implement this for Haslo/merawing.

Would you mind another thread for talking about what your house rules are (not to discuss their balance) but maybe their complexity? Seeing 3 costs is already making this look steep.

Duplicate post

Adding the "X-wing 2.0" prefix and calculating point costs for print/export seem trivial for any squad builder. But it's good that are being specific with all the requirements you want. Question is if you can add stuff to the thing and still have it processed properly by Vassal, which would be a problem on their side. Personally, I use TTS for online play and it allows you to import from a bunch of formats with extra stuff like totals tacked in there.

Sadly it is not just points - you have to deal with all the tricky interactions, like titles that add and remove slots, or the tie adv title which has a little ceiling math in it.

See for example https://github.com/lhayhurst/xwlists/blob/master/xwingmetadata.py

i would hazard that most of the builders would face a significant refactoring to support parameterized pointing and upgrade slot behavior.

16 minutes ago, sozin said:

Sadly it is not just points - you have to deal with all the tricky interactions, like titles that add and remove slots, or the tie adv title which has a little ceiling math in it.

See for example https://github.com/lhayhurst/xwlists/blob/master/xwingmetadata.py

i would hazard that most of the builders would face a significant refactoring to support parameterized pointing and upgrade slot behavior.

Oh, interesting. I had not thought of this. Guess it's one of the things that come up when you're actually doing the builder. I can see why there's been some apprehension now.

It's not that it's hard, but I guess it requires handling a lot of scenarios and it's gonna bloat the code. It will make it a longerproject, but if MajorJuggler releases it in "waves", it shouldn't be too bad to add the new stuff. Probably gonna be a better idea to code the new one ground-up rather than trying to adapt the current way it's being handled to support it.

EDIT: Anyways, if there's at least one existing builder that wants to support this, the least I could do now is try to help.

Yeah that was my feeling as well. This is a classic problem in software - devs build a solution that works for exactly the prob spec, and when things change (which is inevitable) management is like, "So just change it, sounds easy!", queue horrified looks from dev team

Yeah, support for direct pasting of XWS data in JSON format in the vassal squad autospawn was added a few months ago for the benefit of some dude's C# squad builder who asked nicely.

If you're willing to calculate the squad points on your side and provide a custom json entry for those points, I can prudently look for that key:value in vassal and import it.

43 minutes ago, sozin said:

Squad cost is not calculated with xws payload. The spec assumes that the receiver of the data will calculate the totals on their own. That said, it can be an optional points field on the pilot or upgrade - I have a backlog item to implement this for Haslo/merawing.

Interesting, so without any updates to vassal, you would want to force the 200 point total in the squad name anyway if you wanted it for reference.

41 minutes ago, Blail Blerg said:

Would you mind another thread for talking about what your house rules are (not to discuss their balance) but maybe their complexity? Seeing 3 costs is already making this look steep.

Eventually but not yet. The point complexity is handled by the squad builder. Each pilot only has one cost for any given upgrade, the squad builder will tell you what it is if you don't want to look it up on the upgrade cards themselves. Some extra point complexity is a necessity evil to get the game balanced. Can't really get around it.

9 minutes ago, sozin said:

Sadly it is not just points - you have to deal with all the tricky interactions, like titles that add and remove slots, or the tie adv title which has a little ceiling math in it.

See for example https://github.com/lhayhurst/xwlists/blob/master/xwingmetadata.py

i would hazard that most of the builders would face a significant refactoring to support parameterized pointing and upgrade slot behavior.

Also true, which is explicitly going to be an issue with the TIEx1 title.

The bigger issue will be custom upgrades. I'll probably end up with around a dozen by the time I'm done. These obviously aren't in the XWS spec.

If the Rookie pilot is balanced at 17-18 points, Integrated astromech should not cost 0 point anymore, because it's better than Hull upgrade.

Otherwise the X-Wing would break the new balanced game...^^

Well, this new thing will we based on the XWS spec, but obviously it can't be it for the reasons that have already been explained. It's gonna be kind of it's own thing as far as outputs go. Main requirement is being compatible with Vassal, it seems. But this would require that the new custom cards actually exist in vassal in the first place. You making the expansion for it?

44 minutes ago, Mu0n729 said:

Yeah, support for direct pasting of XWS data in JSON format in the vassal squad autospawn was added a few months ago for the benefit of some dude's C# squad builder who asked nicely.

If you're willing to calculate the squad points on your side and provide a custom json entry for those points, I can prudently look for that key:value in vassal and import it.

Is this explicitly spelled out in the XWS spec? (Squad points optionally being included, with specific keyword as JSON). If it's not, sounds like a good thing to add, so all the builders are using the same syntax.

I'm not the xws savant, but check Eli's xws spec on github.

16 minutes ago, Wedge Nantillais said:

If the Rookie pilot is balanced at 17-18 points, Integrated astromech should not cost 0 point anymore, because it's better than Hull upgrade.

Otherwise the X-Wing would break the new balanced game...^^

This is a separate discussion from the OP, but suffice to say you haven't seen the rest of the changes, or the change to the overall power curve.

TIE Fighters are also getting a buff, because they can't hit the broad side of a (high agility) barn.

Almost everything is either getting a direct buff or points reduction to bring it back in line with the current tier 1 and tier S stuff. Some of that top end tier 1 and tier S stuff still still needs to get recosted upwards slightly even with the baseline power curve increasing.

21 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

This is a separate discussion from the OP, but suffice to say you haven't seen the rest of the changes, or the change to the overall power curve.

Forgive my stupidity, but where can I find it, please ?

6 minutes ago, Wedge Nantillais said:

Forgive my stupidity, but where can I find it, please ?

Well, its not done yet, let alone public! I'll make a new post when it's out of beta. Right now it only exists in my private googledoc.