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Old 04-10-2016, 12:07 AM   #1
scc
 
Join Date: Mar 2013
Default Would Anyone be Interested in a Vehicles 3rd Ed Workbook?

With VDS taking so long to come, every so often I find myself looking in the direction of Vehicles and I think with a LOT of work I could make a workbook, or series of workbooks, to automate the process.

As much as I respect the work ericbsmith has done in developing and maintaining his Spaceships spreadsheet it does use Macro's and I find that results in it being rather slow and at least with Vehicles I think I can do it without them, making the whole process much faster, if somewhat less easy to use.

I've already played around with doing Beam Weapons, and from the looks of things it is possible to do things the way I describe with only a single minor problem.

Now I'm under no illusions that this isn't a mammoth undertaking, and it may well be the case that I don't get past an initial proof-of-conecpt stage before VDS does come out, but what I aim to do may well have an impact on post-VDS workbooks.

So is anyone interested?
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Old 04-10-2016, 09:20 AM   #2
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: Would Anyone be Interested in a Vehicles 3rd Ed Workbook?

Have you even looked at GVB?

http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/vehiclebuilder/

It's a fundamentally complete and automated program for creating anything possible with Ve2 including the 2 Expansion booklets.

I mean playa around with some programming if you want to but I do not believe you can achieve anything but equal GVB at best.
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Old 04-10-2016, 09:47 AM   #3
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Default Re: Would Anyone be Interested in a Vehicles 3rd Ed Workbook?

I'll second GVB and mention spreadsheets are rarely, if ever, the best way to do stuff like this. For a game, maybe, come back when your HR department is based entirely on a kludged up Excel sheet someone whipped up a decade ago and people just keep passing around and IT only discovers this when the latest version of Excel breaks it. (And I've seen this before.) Double points if Access is involved, too.

One thing to realize is Vehicles allows an arbitrary number of arbitrary items and lets you do arbitrary stuff to them. Spaceships worked well because the system is pretty straightforward (only 20 items ever) while Vehicles can allow stuff like multiple "main bodies" (like a catamaran or the P-38 Lightning), or wrapping the engines in one level of armor, cockpit and avionics in another and fuel system in a third and do so practically detailing down to the bolt.

Once you start digging into GVB you'll realize under the hood it's actually a specialized relational database.
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Old 04-10-2016, 11:32 AM   #4
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Default Re: Would Anyone be Interested in a Vehicles 3rd Ed Workbook?

Yes, when I was a teenager with too much time on my hands and building GV3e vehicles, I remember that the biggest issue was knowing what components to include and how much of them (especially since as one adds in other components, the size of the vehicle changes, and sometimes that means that the quantities of other things have to change too). I had no idea what a reasonable pump capacity for a 16th century carrack was, and every new type of vehicle gave me a new list of components to learn. So I think that such a spreadsheet or flowchart would need to be very specialized: "pulp era automobiles," "classical galleys," ...
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Old 04-10-2016, 11:33 AM   #5
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Default Re: Would Anyone be Interested in a Vehicles 3rd Ed Workbook?

Quote:
Originally Posted by panton41 View Post
...come back when your HR department is based entirely on a kludged up Excel sheet someone whipped up a decade ago and people just keep passing around and IT only discovers this when the latest version of Excel breaks it.
For Reasons, I got stuck maintaining my company's billing system, which was written in Quatro Pro. There was a memory leak in our Quatro Pro version (which was decrepit), so the script had to save it's state, stop itself, and then restart itself, every 20 clients or so.

It was... not nice. No. Don't go there.

Quote:
Originally Posted by panton41 View Post
Once you start digging into GVB you'll realize under the hood it's actually a specialized relational database.
I'll third GVB. I'm quite satisfied with it.

A spreadsheet is an interesting rapid application development environment, and it's fundamentally a functional programming environment rather than a procedural or object oriented one. But it's not feature complete. It can't do loops of an unspecified length, for instance, and all branches of every conditional have to be completely executed whether they're used or not. Which is just... no. There's too many switches and toggles in the vehicle design process.

But they do work fine as a bespoke solution for each design - trying to make your mech work and fiddling around with the numbers until the legs don't fall off but not changing any fundamental design parameters - works great. The more generic you get, the more contorted it gets.
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