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rob
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Old March 7th, 2009, 03:11 AM
AB3.2 Status Update:

Work on AB3.2 has been underway for awhile now. We have some major new features in place already (e.g. PDF output, faster development cycle time for authors). There is a bunch more stuff that will be added over the next few months. Our release target for AB3.2 is the end of May.

The main focus of AB3.2 is three-fold. First, we're going to be revamping the interface and assorted user-centric features quite a bit. There are a bunch of places where we can do things better, make things simpler, etc. Secondly, we want to make life easier for data file authors. Creating data files is a lot of work, and there are quite a few things we can now do that will simplify and/or speed up the authoring process. Lastly, we have implemented a variety of features in our Hero Lab product that would be of value to AB users. We'll be integrating those features into AB, and PDF output is one such example.

Hopefully, this gives you all a basic idea of our focus with AB3.2 and a timetable for when to start anticipating its release. Colen and I will do our best to give you guys periodic updates along the way. If we don't remember to do it because we're up to our eyeballs in the code, please ping us here to remind us. :-)
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rob
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Old March 7th, 2009, 03:25 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by gilvagor View Post
I hope that this update will have the inventory system implemented. I'm extremely looking forward to that part. If it only had that I would be so happy.
Inventory gets really complicated when you introduce the requirement for "fuzzy matching". That's what I call it, at least. A large percentage of gamers are *not* purists. The goal is versatility and playing as wide a variety of army lists as possible. There are many models that can be readily used within units that they don't properly belong to. But if you put them in the back rank, nobody is really going to complain, as long as those models are roughly similar to the rest of the unit.

A "proper" inventory mechanism would allow the user to define the appropriate rules for how "fuzzy" the match can be for models in each unit. And the rules might actually change whether the user is playing in a tournament game or a friendly game with his buddies. That's something that I've mapped out, but the amount of work is beyond what I'm currently able to do. So we won't have "proper" inventory in V3.2.

That being said, we've also mapped out a less powerful approach to inventory that we believe will still be quite useful to a large percentage of players. There are a few uncertainties in the logic that we haven't nailed down yet, so we might find that it's a bust. However, we're definitely striving to get a reasonable first implementation of inventory management into V3.2. Keep your fingers crossed that the approach will work well. :-)
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gilvagor
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Old March 7th, 2009, 05:16 AM
Awesome. Either way I'm looking forward to the release.

I had no idea how much I relied on Army Builder to make army lists until I started playing Chaos Warriors and had to do the lists with pen and paper...my god did that suck. If your playing any GW product AB is a must and that's what I tell everyone that comes into my store that doesn't own AB.
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Team Tau
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Old March 7th, 2009, 04:42 PM
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Originally Posted by rob View Post
V3.2 will be a standard product update. Consequently, anyone with an active license will be able to utilize it automatically.
That's good to hear. My license won't run out until late June of this year, but even if it was going to before, I would have renewed my license. I just like the product so much. Before I got it it took me about 3 hours to make a list. Now it only takes 10 minutes.
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winged_human
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Old March 7th, 2009, 09:03 PM
Rob,
Thanks for the update, and I second Everything Team Tau has said. I hope your health issues are getting better with each passing day, and greatly look forward to AB 3.2 especially the data file author improvements.

thanks for all your hard work.
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rodroth
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Old March 7th, 2009, 11:58 PM
Sounds like you are well underway Rob, great work especially considering the health condition. What program language(s) is the army builder made in?
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Team Tau
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Old March 8th, 2009, 10:21 AM
It appears to be made in C++ or one of its spin offs. (Microsoft VC++ or similar, or C#.) The odd thing about it is that if it is in C++ or C#, it is beyond me how its coded and what commands it uses as it apparently doesn't need DirectX.
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rob
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Old March 8th, 2009, 01:16 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by rodroth View Post
What program language(s) is the army builder made in?
All of our products are written entirely in C++. Well, OK, there is a tiny smattering of C sprinkled in there, but that's merely because that code is *really* old. :-)

We use Visual C++, but we could just as easily use a different flavor of C++. There are a few places where we are tied to Microsoft's syntactic rules, but they could be easily revamped to another tool.

We don't use DirectX. The reason is two-fold. First, we don't need any 3D graphics, so we can use the standard Windows API directly for stuff. Second, DirectX has traditionally been a hugely bloated pig that would have limited the computers on which AB will run. All of the skin handling in our product is done using the 2D Windows API.

We actually rely very little on the built-in Windows mechanisms for visuals. Except for Edit controls, we do virtually everything ourselves. The reason we did this was also two-fold. First, we could do stuff visually with AB that Windows didn't support internally, which was a much bigger factor back in the Win9x days. Second, we could much more readily port AB to another platform - we had planned to port to the Mac for a long time, but could never carve out sufficient time to do it. Now that new versions of Windows have lots of abilities built in and the Mac has switched to Intel (allowing fast VMs), doing everything ourselves is sometimes more limiting than beneficial, but it helped us in the early years of AB.

I hope this little bit of history proves interesting to some of you... :-)
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Team Tau
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Old March 8th, 2009, 01:56 PM
It does. As an amateur computer programmer, I am learning how to use DirectX to program games and other 3D programs. DirectX was a bloated pig until version 7 came out, but I can see that it isn't needed. Btw, the new Bloated Pig for DirectX is the DirectX SDK, which is only needed to program with it.
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rodroth
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Old March 8th, 2009, 10:01 PM
It does indeed Rob, thanks!
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