Developer Notes

Notes by Mike: 

5-22-2008
This last month - had some interuptions - my sugar, work stress, and the inablity to get my mind around a evennt - gui - multi suit handler. Making ground on it - have most the pieces in place - and finally found a very stupid mistake. Soon the quest for fire will have 2 suits and be the race for fire.

4-21-2008
Have terrain costs working - also have a temp of 101.5 - did a little project or Ludrum 48 hour competition should be back at it more serious for at least a few days.

4-10-2008
Battle Suits the quest for fire.
Run it java -jar BattleSuits.jar
Walk to the fire and the game ends

4-5-2008
Been working on map creation and rendering
Making a little ground latest screen shot here

3-31-2008:
Character creation, rules and start of a gui to make them.

3-25-2008
First draft of the text rules for creating suits. Also I have the base for my message based event handler (the code that says at tick 500 move forward).

3-22-2008
I can move a suit around the board - button control only - need to move from button to button using the keys - for that old familar feel.

Screen shot

Java code (run from command line java -jar BattleSuits.jar  - probably double click in windows - depends on your set up.

3-20-2008

Had some system problems - back working at it again.

Also with the platform change, need to work on my java skills - specifically java2d. I hope to have a java demo that has you walking around the map soon.

Also this weekend I hope to post enough rules to build a basic suit.

This is the best place to see what is up on this project - the main page I have to go through the web person to update (I don't do php based web pages).

3-14-2008

First did you celebrate Pi at at 1:59:26 this morning.

Secondly working on the hex map - so I have another little utility

again java so run it java -jar Battlesuits.jar - should work on anything with Sun java installed

It gives different scales of hex maps - let me know what size you like.

Hex scaler can be found here

3-11-2008

Wrote a little java code to handle engine speed and suit size.  Not all that pretty but it works well.

Use to java -jar WeightsandEngines.jar to run this code

I'm not giving out the engine formula - it's a litte convoluted - it came about when I created 3 base suits decided how fast the should be, and how big those engine sizes. The created a formula to give me the numbers I wanted. Look at it in the far ending scales and found it to work well.

3-10-2008

Ok Battlesuits is coming off the back burner

Good news -
Had nice code for doing by tick type movement.

Moving to a java platform - which I am looking forward too.

We have some workable graphics.

Bad new.

The game mechanic (rules) had some serious problems we we are starting from scratch.


So first battle suit weight.

If you double the size of something the weight increases by 8 (2*2*2)

If you assume the smallest suit has alot of free space and use a weight that matches a normal person you get this.
Also you assume the largest suit has a density close to steel (not quite an eight fold gain)

Height	Smallest Weight	Largest Weight
4 Yards	1600 lbs (3/4 Ton)	6 Tons
8 Yards	6 Tons	48 Tons
12 Yards	21 Tons	160 Tons
16 Yards	51 Tons	400 Tons
20 Yards	100 Tons	800 Tons

If you assume a suit can lay (fall) down in a hex the size that look good for a clear easy to work with numbers are
8 Yard (6-48) tons - if you use a hex size of 10 yards the math work out nicely.
20 Yards (100-800) tons with a 20 yard hex

10 Yards to a hex with about 40 hexes acrossed a screen gives maximum weapon range of 400 yards
or 800 yards at a 20 yard scale- which is still unrealistically small but anything realistic would not let you run up and get into hand to hand with them. (except in a few high terrain fights).

So the 20 Yard height for a suit.

Next on to overhead space used.

I have decided

10% internal frame work.
square root tonnage musclature
square root tonnage stabelizers

Now for the cockpit if a 20 yard suit can hold 1000 person sizes then each ton equals 10
person sizes - so one ton seem to small, 3 tons 30 times the space of a person over kill.
So a straight 2 tons it is.

This means free space on suits of the following sizes

100 Tons = 68 tons
1000 tons = 834 tons