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Post by Chris Goodwin on Feb 14, 2014 1:34:59 GMT
Bluesguy posts here, so I thought we needed a thread.
Anyone use it? Anyone want to talk about it?
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Post by tomd1969 on Feb 14, 2014 2:20:39 GMT
I have it. I recently picked it up with HD.
The attack dialogue box is a little wonky and not very intuitive (at least to me). The first tab is a summary of the attacking character's offensive abilities in a list box. Unfortunately, clicking on the entries in the list box does absolutely nothing; this causes a lot of frustrating flipping back and forth between the first and second tabs. The second tab is where you select the type of attack, DCs, OCV, etc, and roll to hit and damage. The third tab is to select the target of the attack. The final tab is to calculate and and commit the results.
This seems a little out of sequence to me. The first thing IMO should be to select which offensive ability the attacking character wishes to use--it should be a simple matter of selecting it in a list box. The second step should be to select a target. The third step should be selecting OCV + bonuses/penalties. The fourth step should be rolling to hit and damage. The final step should be calculating results and committing them to the target character. IMO, YMMV, etc.
Then there is that results calculation screen. I don't have it in front of me, but I seem to remember getting some unexpected results from it (from a Normal Physical attack, of all things). Maybe I was using it incorrectly or had entered the wrong numbers, but the results did not make any kind of sense.
I also had some frustrations with an Entangle attack. It seemed every time I switched back and forth between the first and second tabs, text boxes (the DEF box in particular) would disappear.
But you know what? It's a step. An important step, and comes a long way from doing it on pen and paper.
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bluesguy
Double Digit Master
Just joined
Posts: 39
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Post by bluesguy on Feb 14, 2014 3:27:09 GMT
I have it. I recently picked it up with HD. Thank you for purchasing HCM. I appreciate it. Pretty much everything you stated is accurate, especially " Unfortunately, clicking on the entries in the list box does absolutely nothing; this causes a lot of frustrating flipping back and forth between the first and second tabs." Changing that one problem would probably make the whole process much smoother. It is one of the changes on the features list. I haven't figured out how to implement it yet but I haven't given up on making that happen either. Thank you for the UI design ideas (honestly). I am not a UI designer (I use to do embedded systems - my idea of a UI was a serial port dumping ASCII to a dumb terminal ). I am putting that in my list of to-dos. Interesting. If you ever have that problem again please follow the instructions in the manual for sending me a bug report. Yes that one is in the bug list. I hate it as well. Thank you ... You just made my day.
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Post by tomd1969 on Feb 14, 2014 5:44:40 GMT
Thank you for purchasing HCM. I appreciate it. No problem. To be honest, I'd been thinking of trying something similar but A) my knowledge of Java extends just a little past "Hello, World!" B) Time C) Energy. I have none of these in abundance. Again, my knowledge of Java is a little thin (I'm more familiar with C#, to be honest), so I wish I could help you with that. I'm assuming that you have a class called something like "OffensivePower" (let's go with that), and that you're using a linked list of some kind to track them. Wouldn't the index of the selected item in the list box correspond with the index number of the OffensivePower in the linked list? Just spit-balling. Cool! Just to re-emphasize: This may just have been a bad case of RTFM (which I think stands for "Real Men Don't Read Effing Manuals," but I'm not sure ). I'll read the manual to make sure I'm doing it right. If I can replicate it, I will certainly file a bug report. Awesome! It wasn't just me being obtuse! Hey, credit where credit is due. Pat yourself on the back: that it works as well as it does is no mean feat.
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Post by tomd1969 on Feb 19, 2014 6:52:01 GMT
Okay, I was able to play around with it a little more in the last few days. I might have been misunderstanding what the calculation tab was trying to tell me, so ignore that about "unexpected results" on this tab.
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