So I end one project, and that should give me more time, right? Oh, wait, I dropped the project I wasn't spending enough time on...
So right now the project taking up most of my free time lunch breaks is a battle simulator I'm developing. Okay, calculator would be a better word than simulator. It's mainly a roleplaying tool. Characters in the games I run sometimes end up in large battles. The players want to know how the battles are going, what the results are, and want to feel that their actions directly affect the outcome. Can their actions or participation reduce casualties on their side, for example?
So I'm learning still more about functions in Excel I didn't know were there. I'm writing formulas that wrap the screen four and five times. Then I'll be coding macros to automate copying and pasting calculated and random results around.
The end result will allow me to pretty quickly create armies, pit them against each other, and have forty or fifty thousand individual warriors battling each other. I'll be able to tell you at the end of the battle how any individual fared. I won't be able to tell you which enemy combatants any one fighter encountered specifically, it won't be able to keep a history of that, but it will be able to keep track of damage taken, arrows used up, and all that. I'll be able to tell you how many are how badly wounded afterwards, how much armor needs to be repaired, all that.
I've been doing a lot of winging that in the past, and I've been unhappy with the results. It also takes up more play time than I want it to, slowing the pace of the game. This will do so much more in less time. Best of both worlds.
I'm through the hardest part of it, I think, although there's one bit that suddenly stopped working. I'll have to figure out what I broke so I can fix it. And I'm trying to figure out how to reduce the number of calculations. At the moment it's something like 50 columns wide, with about half of those columns calculating something in each row. I'm wondering how slow it'll get when there's thousands and thousands of those rows (Excel is limited to about 65,000 rows, but that still allows a pretty big battle!)...
Posted by fictionman at March 16, 2005 06:47 AM | TrackBack (0)