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 ChargerIIC wrote:

Dandelion wrote:
A lot of negativity here. I wonder how many people actually read the article.
The combat roster is only PL hence why it is so barebones.
They are also working on a full fledged app to use for points.
Why is combat roster out before the app? Because it was easier to make.

It's the classic problem. Pretty much how every app/piece of software conversation ever goes:

Audience: We want an app

GW: Cool, we got a guy started on it. We could have a fully functional version in a year.

Audience: No, we want it now

GW: Well, I suppose we could release an early version with barebones features...

Audience: Nope. All the features on launch.

GW: But...

Audience: Now

GW: ....

Audience: And 100% uptime with no defects or we will burn your social media to the ground.

That attitude your audience has needs to be called out when they do this. Hence the reason I wish I had a magical non-lethal piece of bamboo I could use to smack the ever living feth out of stupid people with.

I'm also going to wait and see, in the past I have have ATROCIOUS luck with BS. I once wrote a list and the points in BS were totally wrong. I ended up having over 134 points of advantage on my opponent and didn't know it.

 Crimson Devil wrote:

 Kriswall wrote:

Yeah... so, I'm a project manager for a big bank and the majority of what I do at work is programming related. I agree with your above points, but I think it's fair to add that when I roll out a piece of software that covers few if any of the actual things the average end user wants to see... I expect (and usually receive) a negative reaction.

I would imagine your customer base has more realistic expectations for your software.

Nope. Not even a little bit. Sigh.

 Kriswall wrote:

Yeah... so, I'm a project manager for a big bank and the majority of what I do at work is programming related. I agree with your above points, but I think it's fair to add that when I roll out a piece of software that covers few if any of the actual things the average end user wants to see... I expect (and usually receive) a negative reaction..

GW is still working on the list builder app, with points (and hopefully detachments). Once that is out people can complain about X not being in there. But Combat Roster? Not once did they claim it was going to be the final deal. The app is simply not finished. Complaining that it's not finished is silly.

dan2026 wrote:Does anyone even use power levels?
Ever?

I do approx 50% of the time.

LunarSol wrote:

hobojebus wrote:
It's almost like gw is two decades behind the technological level of everyone else.

They should really get their site off Geocities.

this is sad but hilarious.

I tried using it and figured out it wasn't any better than battlescribe. hopefully they really come up with something worthwhile.

I would have no problem paying $10-15ish for an official app that i can download and keep all data on my phone/tablet, rather than something web based.

Dandelion wrote:

 Kriswall wrote:

Yeah... so, I'm a project manager for a big bank and the majority of what I do at work is programming related. I agree with your above points, but I think it's fair to add that when I roll out a piece of software that covers few if any of the actual things the average end user wants to see... I expect (and usually receive) a negative reaction..

GW is still working on the list builder app, with points (and hopefully detachments). Once that is out people can complain about X not being in there. But Combat Roster? Not once did they claim it was going to be the final deal. The app is simply not finished. Complaining that it's not finished is silly.

Kind of like necromunda?
When I read the Combat Roster teaser it didn't have a disclaimer saying it would be a limited unfinished product. Guess I should have kept my expectations low.

 ChargerIIC wrote:

3) Holding the app off until it was 'perfect' is a terrible model. The longer the app stays unreleased the more ingrained the inevitable defects defects are. Warroom had this problem - they tried to launch with a medium featureset and there turned out to be architectural problems in the patch and data management that took years to fix. If Warroom had released earlier in its cycle, they could have fixed the problem upfront, before building layer after layer of features on top of it.

I find it odd that somewhere along the line we were supposed to have just accepted that software will be released in an unfinished state, and we should just expect that it will have bugs.

That's not the case for just about any other product release. We wouldn't accept a car manufacturer releasing a vehicle with poorly functioning cruise control, no door handles and only half an air conditioning system with the promise that these things might be fixed later...

 insaniak wrote:

 ChargerIIC wrote:

3) Holding the app off until it was 'perfect' is a terrible model. The longer the app stays unreleased the more ingrained the inevitable defects defects are. Warroom had this problem - they tried to launch with a medium featureset and there turned out to be architectural problems in the patch and data management that took years to fix. If Warroom had released earlier in its cycle, they could have fixed the problem upfront, before building layer after layer of features on top of it.

I find it odd that somewhere along the line we were supposed to have just accepted that software will be released in an unfinished state, and we should just expect that it will have bugs.

That's not the case for just about any other product release. We wouldn't accept a car manufacturer releasing a vehicle with poorly functioning cruise control, no door handles and only half an air conditioning system with the promise that these things might be fixed later...

It has to do with the unqiue nature of software and it's connection to the Internet. If the new Telsa gets delayed (again), people sigh but troop on - they expect the product to be released once and never improved again. If a better car technology comes out, they expect to buy a whole new car to get it. Nobody expects Telsa to come along a month later and say "Hey, I heard the feedback about wanting this new battery technology. We'll be sending someone to your house to start the upgrade."

This creates two expectations that software people must deal with:

1) No one expects or wants stagnant software any more. You release a fart sounds app, you'll receive a list of fart feature requests within a week from users. You release a 100% 'feature complete' battlescribe knockoff? You'll get a few thousand requests for changes, many of which require serious architecture changes.

2) We are in the age of the preorder and nobody wants to wait for a complete anything software-related. When we do a kickstarter for a tabletop game, we want the beta rules. We do a videogame preorder, we want the beta access (even if we only download the game once before release), when we don't get these things the parent company is accused of 'lacking transparency' or of having 'vaporware'.

Which leads to the big problem:

1) Software is associated with the Internet. If you do't keep the internet audience happy, they will spend far more hours degenerating your product than you could ever do promoting it.

Most people aren't crazy about the 'minimum viable product' model (especially the people that work on it), but it allows the customers to take an early hand in guiding its creation and prevents you from devoting a bunch of man-hours to say Relic management, when the audience would rather have point costs first.

In this case it's also letting them find out all the weird browser based issues that are going to crop up before the app gets to large to address such problems easily. One of the products I'm responsible for has IFrame problems (as in it uses iFrames in the first place) and it's taking a hell of lot more man-hours to remove the damn things than it ever did to put them in.

The point I want to make is that this is not only a common model, but one that fits with the psychology of the Internet. Unless the Internet community as a whole becomes way more tolerant, slow to react, and less paranoid, this is the model you'll start to see more and more often. The good news is that the app will likely be in active development for a long time and most importantly is actively seeking feedback. So give your feedback - just leave out the vitriol. Tell them which feature you'd want to see next, which bugs you want squashed first, and about that weird display error when you pull it up in browser X.

 Insurgency Walker wrote:

Dandelion wrote:

 Kriswall wrote:

Yeah... so, I'm a project manager for a big bank and the majority of what I do at work is programming related. I agree with your above points, but I think it's fair to add that when I roll out a piece of software that covers few if any of the actual things the average end user wants to see... I expect (and usually receive) a negative reaction..

GW is still working on the list builder app, with points (and hopefully detachments). Once that is out people can complain about X not being in there. But Combat Roster? Not once did they claim it was going to be the final deal. The app is simply not finished. Complaining that it's not finished is silly.

Kind of like necromunda?
When I read the Combat Roster teaser it didn't have a disclaimer saying it would be a limited unfinished product. Guess I should have kept my expectations low.

My wording is a little murky. Combat Roster is finished (minus some typos and such). The list builder app has not been released at all, from what I can tell. A fan offered to make combat roster, so GW published it. They are still working on the full app. Combat Roster and the app are two different pieces of software.

Okay, I got bored, came back for a second look with some tools.

The whole thing is apparently fully implemented in javascript. Including unit data. I figured there'd be some backend or something to make requests to depending on what you clicked on, but it's all just preloaded in a "json.min.js" file.

You can literally just save the entire webpage to your desktop and then open it and it be function. It'll look a little janky because you don't have the other assets like graphics, but otherwise it works just fine.

I'm not saying that anyone should go and do this, but its probably enough of a framework to be able to roll your own army builder and trivially turn power level into points or whatever, even if you don't know anything about programming..

 daedalus wrote:
Okay, I got bored, came back for a second look with some tools.

The whole thing is apparently fully implemented in javascript. Including unit data. I figured there'd be some backend or something to make requests to depending on what you clicked on, but it's all just preloaded in a "json.min.js" file.

You can literally just save the entire webpage to your desktop and then open it and it be function. It'll look a little janky because you don't have the other assets like graphics, but otherwise it works just fine.

I'm not saying that anyone should go and do this, but its probably enough of a framework to be able to roll your own army builder and trivially turn power level into points or whatever, even if you don't know anything about programming..

Damnit don't tempt me - I just finished one Ionic project I don't need to start another.

Okay, well, I spoke a little too soon. Load/Save doesn't work, but the export and copy to clipboard do.

 daedalus wrote:
Okay, I got bored, came back for a second look with some tools.

The whole thing is apparently fully implemented in javascript. Including unit data. I figured there'd be some backend or something to make requests to depending on what you clicked on, but it's all just preloaded in a "json.min.js" file.

You can literally just save the entire webpage to your desktop and then open it and it be function. It'll look a little janky because you don't have the other assets like graphics, but otherwise it works just fine.

I'm not saying that anyone should go and do this, but its probably enough of a framework to be able to roll your own army builder and trivially turn power level into points or whatever, even if you don't know anything about programming..

Points require a ton of other structure to function.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 daedalus wrote:
Okay, I got bored, came back for a second look with some tools.

The whole thing is apparently fully implemented in javascript. Including unit data. I figured there'd be some backend or something to make requests to depending on what you clicked on, but it's all just preloaded in a "json.min.js" file.

You can literally just save the entire webpage to your desktop and then open it and it be function. It'll look a little janky because you don't have the other assets like graphics, but otherwise it works just fine.

I'm not saying that anyone should go and do this, but its probably enough of a framework to be able to roll your own army builder and trivially turn power level into points or whatever, even if you don't know anything about programming..

Points require a ton of other structure to function.

I couldn't help myself. "compType" : "extra" gives existing support for optional features to be added to a unit. Look at hive tyrants for an example of actual implementation.

/shrug



Automatically Appended Next Post:
And really, this is 8th ed 40k. The vast majority of the units could be altered to simply reflect the only variant of them that is ever used:

Example:

"name":"Militarum Tempestus Command Squad" -> "name":"Militarum Tempestus Command Squad w/ 4 plasmaguns"
"cost":3 -> "cost":(whatever in points)

and so on.

It's not a 100% generic army building program, but it'd cover most use cases.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh. Maybe I'm late to the game but I just realized it's an almost exact copy of this:

https://battleroll.games/rollcall