Rifts Character Generator - Custom Armor/Weapons/Power Armor

Sometimes this project feels like a bottomless pit!

I opened the app up to a few testers. One of these testers has been, and continues to be, extremely thorough. He has found technical glitches, data entry errors, performance issues, and has provided general suggestions. The good news is that I’m receiving excellent feedback which will result in a better user experience. The drawback is that I have way more work to do on this than I thought.

A big hold-up has to do with Armor, Weapons, and Power Armor. Originally, as you create a character, you had to build your own armor and weapon. Due to copyright, I did not want to provide a pulldown with every Northern Gun weapon from the books, etc… I don’t think PB would appreciate that. So you build your own! This worked fine - you build your weapon for your character. Great!

So you build another character and you want to use the very same armor/weapon you created for the previous character. Well, you have to re-enter all the information for the weapon. In other words, each armor/weapon you build is directly tied to the specific character being created. That is a data-entry nightmare for the user, not to mention grossly inefficient. 

The solution is obvious: when a weapon is created, make it generally available for your account. This way you can attach that armor/weapon to any character you create. Great! 

Except the back-end database isn’t set-up that way - everything is attached to a Character object. This was a short-sited design on my part. What if the user has an environment setting they’d like to set? There was no place to store that. So I had to create a “User” object in the database, connect the user’s Characters to it, and off we go. This allows me to attach armor and weapons to the User object instead of the character. (I hope this rambling is making some sense…) So now the user can create their own armor, weapons, etc. 

That said, I needed to create a whole separate section of the app for creating this custom devices. There is a new menu in the top nav bar called “Customizations.” From there, you can create your armor, weapon, and power armor (in progress). Once created, it is available as a pulldown when you create your character. 

Creating the weapon/armor/power armor creation section has been challenging. The form to create one isn’t so bad. It’s the going-back-to-edit-it that is challenging. Well, not ‘challenging’ so much as tedious. If you want to edit an existing item, a modal window pops up where you can make your changes. Yay. This is fine for Armor and Weapons, but is proving to be difficult with Power Armor simply because there are so many variables for Power Armor that I can’t fit it in the modal. Hmm…. I need to figure out a better way. 

Unrelated, I need to fight the urge to fall into the trap of adding more and more features. My priority should be getting this thing working and opening up for general use. Yet I feel compelled to add more… I can always add more later, so why don’t I just wait? Because I’m impatient and want it to do everything all at once! I should be taking an iterative approach to this rather than a Big Bang approach. But there I one feature I really feel I should work on: R.C.C.s. 

What is an R.C.C.? I don’t know, the definition of an R.C.C. seems to vary depending on who you ask and which book you’re reading. So I made up my own definition: if it has its own attribute notation and Base/Related skills selections, it’s an R.C.C. Great, so now what do I do with that? I don’t want to make a third drop down on the first page for “R.C.C.”; that’ just going to look sloppy. So here’s what I’m thinking:

In the “Race” pulldown, the user selects “R.C.C.” as the race. Then the O.C.C. menu gets re-populated solely with R.C.C.s. From there, it will treat the R.C.C. like an O.C.C. There are some subtle problems with this, such as updating the verbiage in the app and on the printable sheet to say “R.C.C.” instead of “O.C.C.” when an R.C.C. is selected. Nevertheless, I’m giving it a try using the Malvoren has my test case. It’s not working as expected yet, but it’ll get there.

This has been a long-ish update. I shall post now.