Frood AACalc Dicey / Sim / Odds Calculator: Updates and Opinions

Well, not this weekend - some other things have come up (including an FTF game with Mr. Ghoul and Cystic Crypt, pretty sweet)

However, I have uploaded a slight update:

• Dice sets display on separate lines
• fixed minor glitch: battle round # was being incremented even if illegal combination entered.

I know, that’s really exciting… but it’s all about attention to detail.

Just enter 1 Bom for the attacker and check the AA box. The Bom roll is your damage and the AA roll is the AA roll.

It won’t work without AA checked, so check it even if there is no AA and just ignore the AA result.

Akreider just pointed out that the links my bid page was sending out were not correct  :oops:

This is fixed now, you should have no problems using the link in the e-mail to reply to a bid.

Thanks to some diligent bug-hunting by Mircea Pauca of Romania, the following glitches have been found:

1. Naval combats getting aborted when the defender had only air units remaining

2. IPC differential calculating incorrectly when attacking destroyers were present

3. OOL appears not to work in IE6 - I don’t have that legacy browser so I can’t verify.

4. Also, JSP requested that I enable SBRs even without AA guns.

I have fixed 1, 2, and 4.

SBRs: just enter a single bomber for the attacker. Of course, ignore if aacalc says that it hit, because it will still roll for a target of 4. Add an AA gun if there is one. Previously, aacalc did not roll the die for the attacking bomber if there were no defending units and no AA gun present.

Well it’s really weird - I can’t reproduce the error on my copy of IE6 on my basement PC, but maybe it’s a different version?

In any event, it has actually sparked me to start thinking about a complete re-build of AACalc that would ditch the OOL fields entirely. It would also ditch the individual unit fields.

Instead, there would be one line for each side, and you would enter text like “6 Inf 1 Bom 3 Arm 2 Ftr” - OOL would simply be the order the units are listed in. It would also then allow you to split the units, eg: “1 TRN 1 AC 2 DD 2 Ftr 1 AC 1 BB” - so one AC is taken early as a casualty, but the other one is saved for later.

I might shorten the unit codes too, eg: I for Infantry, A for Art, T (Tank) for Armour (what they’re actually called in AAR) and so on. Spaces would be optional, so you could enter “6I2A3T2F1B” or “6I 2A 3T 2F 1B” or “6 I 2 A 3 T 2 F 1 B” or maybe I could even support “6 Inf 2 Art 3 Tanks 2 Ftrs 1 Bom” - it would just take the first letter, and/or work with a table of standard abbreviations - or is that too much work?

Because this would be a significant change to how combat is administered “under the hood” it will probably mean reworking the “engine” from pretty much the ground up. This could be a good thing because when I first started on this project, I had only played A&A once or twice, I really didn’t understand opening fire, how subs worked, and a lot of things. As I learned these things I patched them in but the result was extremely complicated code that just spun out of control and is now a nightmare to work with.

Now that I actually understand the combat sequence and some of the difficulties in coding it, I think I could create a leaner, meaner script that would also be easier to debug and revise, and also to add new units and rules to - eg., National Advantages etc. This will also simplify the form somewhat while increasing the power and flexibility of the utility I think.

But, it’s not going to happen over night. Just thought I’d post the idea here for feedback.

Yes, don’t worry. This will be a long process.

I am actually thinking I might leave the old one in place, and develop the new one at a new location (maybe even the main page of frood.net, since this gets all my traffic really for the site, or at http://aacalc.frood.net/ or something like that. This will be necessary because the new one won’t initially have all the features that the old one does, but once it is running smoothly and people are using it I will move it over. I may have to recruit some beta testers to help it along, because I can’t test every combination of features myself anymore.

And just for the record - that last glitch was totally unforeseen - it was not the result of any changes I made to the code, but because the google ads I added to the page caused the page to be invisibly run twice for each set of results. Okay, I guess I should have tested it - but still, it was a really weird glitch that I couldn’t really have expected.

Thanks for that reminder - I’ve been thinking about changing the layout of the page for that reason. I’ll see what I can do.

What I aimed for was to get it to work at 1024*768.

My display is one 12801024 and one 16801050.  :evil: One shows the map, and one shows the browser.

@Baghdaddy:

I don’t know what most folks run by my monitor chugs along at 1400 x 1050 pixels.  Getting the dicey into 700 x 1050 would be sweet.

Here’s one thing you can do in the meantime:

1. Go to the frood.net main page
2. In the “Try different design” select box, choose the “scratchy” design and click "Rest of browser session. That design is a little borked but it does place the links at the top of the page.

Whoopeee!!!

Head on over to http://frood.net/aacalc/beta/ and try the new AACalc - basically the form has been greatly simplified - just type in your battle eg. 3 Inf 2 Ftrs v. 2 Inf 1 Arm. OOL is based on the order in which units are listed.

So this gets rid of all the individual fields and much mouse-clicking. It should also fix the problem with OOL not working for some people.

The biggest benefit though will be that it is now really easy for me to add units to the game. Just for shits and giggles, I’ve added a Zombie unit - it’s worth 20 IPCs, but it attacks on a 4 and defends on a 5! Try it out at http://frood.net/aacalc/beta/.

So I expect to be adding NA units to the Calc in short order.