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Hi folks,

After having so many games of 40k where I've been packing away my models, then remembered some rules that I totally forgot about during the game, I decided to try and build an app that I could use to help me out. The idea is that you'll use this as you play - you select which unit you're currently controlling, then select the phase and whether it's your turn or your opponent's, and you'll get a list of all the unit abilities, detachment rules and stratagems that are relevant at that point.

I imagine it'll be helpful mostly for newer players or casual players who know the core rules, but haven't yet memorised all the abilities of their units and the stratagems. It could also be handy for people who know the rules really well, but are maybe trying out a new army.

I've tried to start off small by just supporting Combat Patrol games at first, but even that has been a pretty massive task to get all the logic of mustering the army and displaying the rules! To help me, I've used Claude AI to read through the Combat Patrol PDFs and spit out the details in a format I can store in my app's database. While that's been a massive time-saver, I'm fully aware that AI can confidently spout nonsense when it feels like it (I've had to remove quite a few instances of it saying various rules apply during the now defunct 'Psychic' phase). So, while I've got a good number of Combat Patrols added to the app now, I've not had chance to go through them all with a fine-toothed comb to make sure everything is 100% accurate.

I've not got many people that I play 40k with, so I'm wondering if people here would like to kick the tyres and see what they think?

I'd love to hear some feedback about how people find it. I've got plenty of ideas for new features and improvements already, but would love to be guided by what people think they would like to see from an app like this.

Thanks!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Being new here, I wasn't allowed to put the URL to the app in my first post, so you can access it at https://whtf.site

tjl2 wrote:
I've tried to start off small by just supporting Combat Patrol games at first, but even that has been a pretty massive task to get all the logic of mustering the army and displaying the rules! To help me, I've used Claude AI to read through the Combat Patrol PDFs and spit out the details in a format I can store in my app's database. While that's been a massive time-saver, I'm fully aware that AI can confidently spout nonsense when it feels like it (I've had to remove quite a few instances of it saying various rules apply during the now defunct 'Psychic' phase). So, while I've got a good number of Combat Patrols added to the app now, I've not had chance to go through them all with a fine-toothed comb to make sure everything is 100% accurate.

that seems bad... surely using an AI that you already have seen to be inaccurate is not easier than just copying the text of the PDFs into your program. that's what the other herein unnamed rules website does. if your AI is so bad as to keep referring to rules which don't even exist this edition, then why do i have any reason to trust it about things which ostensibly seem more plausible? you've already admitted to its inaccuracy

After spending hours researching how to get the text out of the PDFs programatically, I couldn't find a solution that would work reliably with the Games Workshop PDFs. I then found that Claude AI could parse PDFs (that's not "my" AI, btw), so that seemed like a good solution to save me the time of copying out everything by hand. If I copied everything manually, I don't think I'd have the time to ever finish the app, so it seemed like a decent tradeoff to me.

Yes, there have been some quirks where the AI has not known that the Psychic phase is no longer a thing in 10th Ed, but you can continue to train Claude as you go, so I pointed out to it that there was no Psychic phase after that particular PDF got parsed, and that was the end of that.

tjl2 wrote:
After spending hours researching how to get the text out of the PDFs programatically, I couldn't find a solution that would work reliably with the Games Workshop PDFs. I then found that Claude AI could parse PDFs (that's not "my" AI, btw), so that seemed like a good solution to save me the time of copying out everything by hand. If I copied everything manually, I don't think I'd have the time to ever finish the app, so it seemed like a decent tradeoff to me.

Yes, there have been some quirks where the AI has not known that the Psychic phase is no longer a thing in 10th Ed, but you can continue to train Claude as you go, so I pointed out to it that there was no Psychic phase after that particular PDF got parsed, and that was the end of that.

but the PDFs are right there... and you can read, i assume, since you're posting on a forum... so presumably, you could just copy the text from the PDFs yourself. they're only a few pages long each, so this seems like an unbelievably more obtuse way of handling things than just control + c and then control + v into a document. this seems stupid and i'm not sure why you're doing it this way. this is a net zero for the community because the one issue you've already noticed is pretty fething big and is very concerning for the accuracy. and if i'll have to be checking the PDFs to ensure my rules are remotely correct, then why am i using this in the first place? the use of AI here is entirely unnecessary

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:


but the PDFs are right there... and you can read, i assume, since you're posting on a forum... so presumably, you could just copy the text from the PDFs yourself. they're only a few pages long each, so this seems like an unbelievably more obtuse way of handling things than just control + c and then control + v into a document. this seems stupid and i'm not sure why you're doing it this way. this is a net zero for the community because the one issue you've already noticed is pretty fething big and is very concerning for the accuracy. and if i'll have to be checking the PDFs to ensure my rules are remotely correct, then why am i using this in the first place? the use of AI here is entirely unnecessary

The AI use was necessary to automate getting the data into a format I could use to import into my database. With PDFs, it's generally not the case that you can just copy & paste, because the layouts can stop it working correctly (try it on the weapons tables within a unit's data card for example). Doing this would likely lead to making mistakes in the process anyway.

You talk about pasting into "a document". What's the document you refer to in this case? How would this 'document' then be used to populate a database? You say a lot without knowing how the app works or what my database schemas are and you don't even know what format I'm wanting this data in… you seem very confident in your assertions without having any context – if I hadn't even mentioned how I was getting the data from the PDFs, I wonder if you would've even commented?

For some background, the issue with the Psychic phase was picked up by the import process I wrote that feeds the database from the YAML data that Claude AI generates. Validations are programmed in to the DB schemas to stop garbage going into the database that the app relies on. Yes, AI generates that YAML data, but my database won't blindly import data that doesn't match the expected schema. So don't assume there has been zero checking done – the data has all been checked and refined so that it will successfully import, but being a human being who isn't infallible, I was simply asking if people would like to have a look and see if they could spot anything I'd missed. You describing it as a "net zero for the community" feels unnecessarily harsh.

You seem to be under the impression that any of the inaccuracies will be disastrous – I appreciate you putting so much importance on my hobby app, but the sort of things that might be inaccurate are scenarios where perhaps a unit's ability might show up in the wrong phase, or possibly the wrong player turn. Something that can be fixed with a one-line change in the YAML file, and kicking off the import process again.

To help me with this project going forwards, I needed to work on a system that can automate the process of getting the details out of the PDF in a repeatable way. Sure, you could probably have done a mix of copy & pasting and some data entry to get info out of the PDFs into the YAML formats that I'm using to populate my database. Doing it that way, you could maybe have created 3 or 4 Combat Patrols in the time it took me to train the AI to do it; but for 34 Combat Patrol PDFs? No thanks.

I'm happy to talk about the app's implementation specifics, as I love this stuff, but not from the position of defending myself against 'stupidity'. I asked people to kick the tyres, but you appear to have shat on the windscreen without even looking.

if Vyacheslav Maltsev can figure out how to get data from books and PDFs into a workable format without AI, so can you. surely it cannot be that difficult

As with all apps- great until your battery dies or you have a service outage, at which point you can do nothing, because you've been letting a machine do the heavy lifting for your perfectly functional human brain for so long.

Tech assist is a revolution for people with disabilities. When used be people without disabilities, it often prevents them from developing abilities.

Try doing time table speed drills with kids who start using calculators before they were manually taught times tables.

The other thing that has disturbed me about new trends in gaming is that as the competitive scene took off, people started to believe that in order to play, you must have encylcopedic knowledge not just of what your army does, but every rule for every model in the game, and they scream and whine about gotcha moments.

For a lot of people, it was absolutely normal to know the rules for the game and the models you brought to the battle. Everything else was questions, conversation, civility or gotcha... And that was just a part of the game, and people who didn't like it tended not to play.

I know I am grumpy, anti-tech old man. But I also had somewhere around 30-50 phone numbers memorized from childhood onward and I can usually memorize a ten digit number after hearing it once.

This does not mean I am smart. It just happens when you don't let machines memorize numbers for you.

 PenitentJake wrote:


I know I am grumpy, anti-tech old man. But I also had somewhere around 30-50 phone numbers memorized from childhood onward and I can usually memorize a ten digit number after hearing it once.

This does not mean I am smart. It just happens when you don't let machines memorize numbers for you.

i was about to call you out but at least you seem self-aware

 PenitentJake wrote:
As with all apps- great until your battery dies or you have a service outage, at which point you can do nothing, because you've been letting a machine do the heavy lifting for your perfectly functional human brain for so long.

There is an entire spectrum of possibilities from "I know everything by heart due to my amazing memory so don't even need a rulebook to play" and "if my phone dies I literally can't even figure out how to check what a unit does." I've yet to have anyone have their device die in the middle of a game against me, nor have I ever encountered someone who's incapable of playing the game at all without access to their device, but you keep on hacking away at that strawman.

 PenitentJake wrote:
Tech assist is a revolution for people with disabilities. When used be people without disabilities, it often prevents them from developing abilities.

What? This is in no way analogous to what you're describing. Not that it matters, because what you're describing is complete rubbish anyway.

At worst, I've seen people try to use Wahapedia to play a game of 40k, and it often doesn't go well. Thing is, they're the same people that would show up without their Codex and a crappy grasp of the basic rules anyway. I don't think the technology is the problem here.

 PenitentJake wrote:
Try doing time table speed drills with kids who start using calculators before they were manually taught times tables.

Why? What's the point? Speaking as someone who works with technology in the education sector, I can tell you that modern teaching, certainly in higher education, is about the application of understanding. Learning multiplication tables is useful for understanding what multiplication is, but the idea that you must be able to recite them from memory at speed is simply not something that's recognised as a useful skill any more.

 PenitentJake wrote:
I know I am grumpy, anti-tech old man.

Yes, you are. At least you admit it.

I'm all for digitized play aids but using AI to extract the content is garbage. It isn't remotely reliable enough to serve as a rules reference and by the time you've caught all the nonsense it's added in, you might as well have performed manual extraction to begin with.

 catbarf wrote:
I'm all for digitized play aids but using AI to extract the content is garbage. It isn't remotely reliable enough to serve as a rules reference and by the time you've caught all the nonsense it's added in, you might as well have performed manual extraction to begin with.

I agree. Everything I said above with regard to digital aids and technology is assuming the technology is at least accurate and reliable. The use of AI to populate the database here is likely a trade-off between how time consuming it would be to do manually and how many, and what type of, errors you'd get doing it with AI. I'd reserve judgement until I've actually used the app as far as whether that trade-off is worthwhile.

Slipspace wrote:

Why? What's the point? Speaking as someone who works with technology in the education sector, I can tell you that modern teaching, certainly in higher education, is about the application of understanding. Learning multiplication tables is useful for understanding what multiplication is, but the idea that you must be able to recite them from memory at speed is simply not something that's recognised as a useful skill any more.

And I'm a class room teacher with two decades of experience working with every age group and ability level.

After the Pandemic in Ontario, test scores were so bad here due to online education that the provincial government gave away millions of dollars to to get remedial face-to-face tutoring to catch back up to regular understanding.

It's why I put my argument in the appropriate developmental stage; multiplication is a foundational skill. Those who are better at times table drills also generally learn division and exponentiation for more easily than those who aren't. And if you think that skill in mental math and quick calculation isn't in demand, I'd encourage you to explore the trades and look at pre-apprenticeship numeracy programs. People who can't live without cellphones tend to make poor tradesfolk, and they're the ones who build our houses, keep the lights on and the water flowing.

Those who write their essays themselves become better critical thinkers than those who let AIs their essays for them.

I am not saying technology has no place in education- absolutely it does. It has expanded possibilities for divergent learners, provided greater opportunities for real-time and cross cultural study, and it has greatly improved accessibility. I don't want to go back to a time before the technology existed- we are better off with it than without. But it cannot and should not be a substitute for the development of foundational skills.

And that is something that you recognize as well- you mention the relevance of technology in senior secondary and post secondary education, and I couldn't agree more- at that developmental level, foundational skills and critical thinking should be almost fully formed. As you say, focus shifts to the application of previously attained knowledge and skill.

The difficulty for me with discussions of developmental levels is that for the past decade, I've been working in a differentiated learning environment with adult learners who have histories of interrupted education. If an educational interruption happens at a critical developmental stage, the foundational skill may be lacking. I can get someone who has held down a decent job for years and raised a family, but has to rely on other family members for putting together a household budget because they can't divide, and don't even necessarily know that division is the mathematical operation necessary to solve the problem.

This morning's post was rushed, and yes... grumpy old man.

The truth, and more reasoned and rational argument is that there are different pros and cons to using technology depending on the problem to be solved and the person attempting to solve it; some of those pros and cons are related to the short-term effect (whether or not the problem is solved) and the long term effect (whether or not the person solving the problem develops a transferrable skill as a result of their process). For OP, I question the effectiveness of the app given that: a) many other otions are out there and b) it's all going to get flushed down the toilet in another 22 months when the next edition drops anyway.

Write your gak out on 3.5" index cards that you can pick up at a buckstore for next to nothing- the process of paraphrasing and writing out the relevant rules by hand will do more to help you memorize them than looking them up an an app will anyway.

tjl2 wrote:

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:


but the PDFs are right there... and you can read, i assume, since you're posting on a forum... so presumably, you could just copy the text from the PDFs yourself. they're only a few pages long each, so this seems like an unbelievably more obtuse way of handling things than just control + c and then control + v into a document. this seems stupid and i'm not sure why you're doing it this way. this is a net zero for the community because the one issue you've already noticed is pretty fething big and is very concerning for the accuracy. and if i'll have to be checking the PDFs to ensure my rules are remotely correct, then why am i using this in the first place? the use of AI here is entirely unnecessary

The AI use was necessary to automate getting the data into a format I could use to import into my database. With PDFs, it's generally not the case that you can just copy & paste, because the layouts can stop it working correctly (try it on the weapons tables within a unit's data card for example). Doing this would likely lead to making mistakes in the process anyway.

You talk about pasting into "a document". What's the document you refer to in this case? How would this 'document' then be used to populate a database? You say a lot without knowing how the app works or what my database schemas are and you don't even know what format I'm wanting this data in… you seem very confident in your assertions without having any context – if I hadn't even mentioned how I was getting the data from the PDFs, I wonder if you would've even commented?

For some background, the issue with the Psychic phase was picked up by the import process I wrote that feeds the database from the YAML data that Claude AI generates. Validations are programmed in to the DB schemas to stop garbage going into the database that the app relies on. Yes, AI generates that YAML data, but my database won't blindly import data that doesn't match the expected schema. So don't assume there has been zero checking done – the data has all been checked and refined so that it will successfully import, but being a human being who isn't infallible, I was simply asking if people would like to have a look and see if they could spot anything I'd missed. You describing it as a "net zero for the community" feels unnecessarily harsh.

You seem to be under the impression that any of the inaccuracies will be disastrous – I appreciate you putting so much importance on my hobby app, but the sort of things that might be inaccurate are scenarios where perhaps a unit's ability might show up in the wrong phase, or possibly the wrong player turn. Something that can be fixed with a one-line change in the YAML file, and kicking off the import process again.

To help me with this project going forwards, I needed to work on a system that can automate the process of getting the details out of the PDF in a repeatable way. Sure, you could probably have done a mix of copy & pasting and some data entry to get info out of the PDFs into the YAML formats that I'm using to populate my database. Doing it that way, you could maybe have created 3 or 4 Combat Patrols in the time it took me to train the AI to do it; but for 34 Combat Patrol PDFs? No thanks.

I'm happy to talk about the app's implementation specifics, as I love this stuff, but not from the position of defending myself against 'stupidity'. I asked people to kick the tyres, but you appear to have shat on the windscreen without even looking.

You're asking people to help keep the walls from sagging, all you're getting is questions of "why would you build a house out of wet mud in the first place? There's a pile of bricks right there!". And while I agree that that isn't helpful at this point, it's hardly surprising.

Sounds like an awesome hobby project though, and if you do get the data quality sorted out this could be very helpful.

You are right, I agree with you.