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Hi

I've played table top games for a lot of my life and I feel I should attempt to give something back to the community. I have been programming for about 3 years now in my free time making a variety of things for personal use. Recently I felt I wanted to challenge myself and attempt to produce a working program which I can release to the community. I decided I wanted to program an army builder program. Currently I am in the design phase so I thought it best to approach the community and ask you, What do you want from an army builder?

Thanks in advance for any answers and feel free to ask questions.

What I would LIKE would be a point and click list for each army. Each unit would have its own entry, prepoulated with points cost, a box with the default unit size (which I could modify) with subheading rows for optional weapons, upgrades, etc, and an option to indicate with a single click, or typing in a number, how many models took each upgrade. I'd like said builder to add up points, power levels and command points automatically, and to flag any "illegal" choices with an option to modify or accept at that point. I'd also like an easy, clear printout option. Oh, and next week's winning lottery numbers too. (If you don't ask....)

Clean output. Multiple levels of detail would be nice, but in general I don’t need to sift through pages of details to find out if I gave my sarge a melta bomb this game.

the ability to tell me which detachments I can use with my models instead of forcing me to select one and see if it works

It depends entirely on the game, but I really appreciate a 'play' mode.

I play a lot of Infinity, and I use the army builder Mayanet. This has a 'play' mode where you can track the living state of individual models which in turn tracks your Retreat level. And bit of equipment, weapon or skill can be clicked on to bring up the official wiki entry.

With Malifaux, there's a third party builder called Crewfaux, which has a live scenario tracker. This lets you generate a scenario set, create a QR code so others can generate the same set, and then lets you track points as you play. It also has 'summon cards', which brings up a list of models, and the values needed, that can be summoned by certain masters in the game.

These sort of features to remove the book keeping from games are what I appreciate most.

Just bring back the old one that got shitcanned by GW without the images.

You're going to need more people.

For a start, this is not actually a small bit of software; the core code is going to take a while to implement.

You also need a bunch of people to work out what the structures of army-list systems for various rules-sets are like in order to generate the features for the core.

And you need a bunch of people to produce the rules-as-code for each of the rule-systems.

And putting my "I'm a professional software engineer" hat on;

1) Build it as a website so you don't have to worry so much about supporting different versions -- it's just always running the latest one. Make sure people can download their own datafiles to save them off.

1a) Write lots of tests as you go.

2) Make the rules-handling part an actual programming language. It looks like the right thing to do to have a text file which says things like "orc-battlewagon min=0 max=4 points=300", but that gets really complicated really quickly. If you use an actual language to express this, you can handle the special cases. (The bit where the rules say "unless you have a command section and the command section has a battlewagon in which case the maximum is 2"...). Otherwise, your neat and simple description language grows and grows until it's an actual programming language, but it'll be a badly specified, difficult-to-parse one at that point.

3) Split out the system into parts -- don't worry about how to print the output while you're trying to sort out the "is this list valid" part.

4) Use portable, well known languages. Java or Python would be my choices 'cos I'm old. Server-side JavaScript is what all the kids use these days. Why? Because when you get stuck, you can find more people to help fix bits of code...

5) Don't underestimate the size of the job. I wrote a system for doing this just for Flintloque and the list verification is 3000 lines of Python and 350 lines of PostScript for printing.

(If there's a sane way for us to exchange email addresses (is there a private messaging system here?), I'll happily offer help.)