Good first attempt but I don’t think that pie chart control’s behaviour is going to make your job easy. The problem is when you go from small battles to larger ones. The slices on the pie chart don’t necessarily line up. Say we enter 20 tanks attacking 14. I would like to see the odds of losing 5 tanks to be next to the slice representing loss of 4 tanks and on the other side the loss of 6 tanks. Personally, I think a line chart showing a bell curve is most informative as keeps related pieces of info together, ie, loss of 4 or 5 or 6 side by side, not 2, 13, 7 side by side and its easier for the mind to relate to height of points side by side versus size of slices even side by side especially if the pie has 20+ slices.
For instance, enter a tank battle of 20 attacking 14 in this Sim:
http://aacalc.nfshost.com/
Now view the section under Attacker results and notice how those bars in the bar chart form a bell curve. Losing 0, 1, 19 and 20 tanks are not shown as they are so unlikely to occur. If the battle only had 6 units you could show every unlikely outcome, since its a battle of 34 units total there are so many ‘likely’ outcomes to display you can truncate the numbers of unlikely outcomes. If you could turn that on its side or use a line chart showing likely losses along the bottom with the height showing % outcome that would be da bomb.
What would be super sweet is if you could generate a new window containing this graph along with a heading displaying what was in the battle. This way one could generate multiple ‘scenarios’ and minimize the windows to be reviewed later and have more than 1 graph, new windows means you can have 1 or 1, 000 graphs on the go. In VB it was pretty easy to launch new windows so it should be in other languages. Now if this new window’s size and graph control were re sizable then users could enlarge or shrink the graph as needed.
Just a minor thing. Your OOL text box controls look inactive on my system, the text colour of the contents makes it look like the drop down list control for the simulator rules, ie inactive. I am sure I can’t be the only bonehead who initially thought that control was inactive……or at least I hope I wasn’t!
Keep up the good work. The hard part is done, now its for the window dressing. In my experience, your boss will rarely see the engineering that goes into writing good code. When I write code for database manipulation, 80% of it is error handling that hopefully never gets executed, hardly glamorous. They do see the user interface however…A few easy bells and whistles here pays off LARGE!!
