It's been a week, so I might as well make a quick progress update on the FEF calculator.
Long story short, it's code, so it's simultaneously almost finished and nowhere near finished. Most of the core logic is done or at least patterned out, and we're repurposing GUNINANRUNIN's old calculator's shell so it looks fabulous.
At present, the calculator functions off of copy+pasted JSON arrays. Those aren't actual words unless you're familiar with them, so it's time for pictures.
This is the converter. "What converter?" Excellent question. See, you enter in your stats (and once I add it, weapons, progression rates, anything it's handy to have) and it spits out this:
[{"name":"Dale Barton","hp":"16","mhp":"16","str":"4","def":"3","res":"1","skl":"5","spd":"4","lck":"2"},{"name":"NEW"},{"name":"NEW"},{"name":"Seaiga","hp":"19","mhp":"19","str":"2","def":"0","res":"3","skl":"4","spd":"4","lck":"2"},{"name":"Nick Lendel","hp":"18","mhp":"18","str":"4","def":"2","res":"0","skl":"5","spd":"4","lck":"2"}]
"The hell is that?" Also excellent question. You dump that into this:
"So what's THAT?" Another excellent question. This is the UI of GUNINANRUNIN's previous stab at a FEF calculator, slightly maimed to suit our current work. Once it's operational, it'll be what you see while selecting a character from a dropdown list on each side of the screen, selecting a weapon from another nearby dropdown list, modify their (temporary) stats in those convenient boxes, and then hitting the fight button to calculate and display the results of them having a go.
So why the first two hoops? To conveniently store characters. GUNIN's previous method of parsing out pastebin data was brilliant, but suffered from a few major headaches. JSON text can be converted directly to and from javascript data, meaning you can copy+paste an entire roster of goons each with their own collection of weapons all in one easy step.
This will mean you'll need to keep around a master text file of JSON gobbledegook, but also that this is
all you'll need to keep, and that said file can record HP, xp, weapon quality, and otherwise pretty much anything you'd want. And as mentioned, generating the text in the first place should be as easy as filling out boxes.
For the actual hitting each other with sticks part: Most of it is done but hasn't yet been integrated into the shell or with the underlying stats code, and the weapon data code is not solid yet. Once both of those are done, though, it'll mostly be finished in its most basic sense.