"Advanced" Battlereports

[Wishmaster]

Could there be an option on News screen when u check ur battlereport to check it with more info?

I m thinking along the lines of ole style bcalcs, so that u can se innit 1 fire first

-Innit 1- x amount spiders freezes x amount of x type of ship with x amount of guns. x amount of guns ( if any) were unused.

then take each ship after init.

This way I think the new players / more casual players will understand more of how the stats work..and to see what goes on in a battle. And to see how many ships they have to send, many players dont use bcalcs.. or got any idea how effective the diff. ships r.

Shoulndt be much work to implement?

[furball]

I'd love a battlecalc to do this again, so I suppose it would be good for the game to do it too.

[Cannon_Fodder]

I'm for bcalcs to do it, don't think it's worth it in-game though.

[Phil^]

would mean a horrendous increase in the storage required for the game, each combat would need both a basic and advanced version done and stored, would increase the tick time a little as well.
tbh its not hard to write something to work backwards from a combat report to give the info you want really

[Ramihyn]

Originally Posted by Phil^

would mean a horrendous increase in the storage required for the game, each combat would need both a basic and advanced version done and stored, would increase the tick time a little as well.
tbh its not hard to write something to work backwards from a combat report to give the info you want really

Then why not make a function which dynamically creates the extended battlereport from the stored simple report

[cypher]

Battlecalcs should go back to old style

[Kal]

It could possibly increase the tick time as its more things to do during combat.

[Heartless]

Originally Posted by Ramihyn

Then why not make a function which dynamically creates the extended battlereport from the stored simple report

Model - View - Controller pattern would solve this problem without significantly increasing tick time and at the same time offering even more ways of displaying combat results.

[Banned]

Originally Posted by Phil^

would mean a horrendous increase in the storage required for the game, each combat would need both a basic and advanced version done and stored, would increase the tick time a little as well.

No it wouldn't, because:

tbh its not hard to write something to work backwards from a combat report to give the info you want really

Then the PA coders could do that!

[Wishmaster]

I got no idea how it would be to code..

But I miss this from bcalcs in good old days, and to have it implemented into the game would be a nice feature imo. Atleast I hope someoen add it to a bcalc

[Ramihyn]

Originally Posted by Kal

It could possibly increase the tick time as its more things to do during combat.

I assume that the simple battle report contains a full list of participating entities (ships, structures, roids) which is stored anyway. The only thing a dynamically (if user clicks "show me how it happened" link) generated detailed combat report additionally might need would be a random number initiator if the battle involves any random factor at all. As long as the combat calculation engine didnt change in between, that would be enough to generate detailed battlereports on demand. Would even be enough to feed a 3d engine to play back some nonsense battleszene based on the data

"On demand" means you spread the CPU use a lot and also probably only a fraction of players ever click it. Even if many players click it - obviously its a often desired feature and needed to be in

The only bad thing i could see by that design is that users hammer the link like BSE infected monkeys on crack and thereby create more cpu stress than storing the advanced data initially.

[Ramihyn]

On a sidenote - i really dislike the "it increases the tick time" argument by now

http://pirate.planetarion.com/showpo...7&postcount=24

In that thread we are assuming a 10min ticktime for 180k planets - in other threads credible people talk about a 40/50 minute ticktime and sometimes even over an hour if much happened. Now in 2006 with just 3000 to 4000 players we still get the tick-time argument :/

[Bromcrysal]

Ok, I like this Idea (even tho I have no concept of the coding issues... ) because it would really help us somewhat new players (I've played one full round, so far) learn from our mistakes.The scenario being: "WTF happened?" would change to: "WTF, I thought blah ship fired before blahblah ship... guess I should use the BCalc next time." This is a game of details, and being able to figure out what detail we missed quickly, withought having to send the battlerep to an alliancemate and endure mocking laughter, would be a good accellerator to the learning curve.

Not that my ROCKmates would ever laugh at me

[Ultimate Newbie]

Originally Posted by Ramihyn

Then why not make a function which dynamically creates the extended battlereport from the stored simple report

This is an excellent solution. I'd argue that it would increase the bandwidth, but increasing the ticker time is a little dubious i reckon as (i imagine) that the Extended report would be a button next to the existing calc which then creates the step by step process displayed underneath. But i dont imagine all that many people who have most of the battles - ie, the top 20% of players - would use it all that often as they would know what was going on more or less anyway. Where it would be useful, as mentioned in the original post, is for those who do not understand the combat system, and having it set out step by step would help immesuably with that.

Go for it, i reckon!

[SpaceMonkey]

My bcalc http://blern.gotadsl.co.uk/bcalc.html produces a simple report divided on init.
I could have another look and see how easy it would be to divide on ships, when I get time.

[BlackDog]

I agree, it's a good idea. If the PA team could implement it back in the old days with about 10 times the number of players and a worse server, then they can do it now with 3k players and decent hardware. Toggle button does seem to be the way to go, and I do like some of the ideas posted by Ramihyn earlier in this thread. Overall I think it's worth the effort

[Ultimate Newbie]

The old reports that listed ships by type, guns fired and target etc, were only displayed in non-official battlecalculators. none were actually made by "PA Team".

Just a bit of clarification: This suggestion is bringing the old display of results by initiative (or type or target) into the game itself, which is a first.