Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

I would love to see a program that would allow you to design a vehicle by “dragging and dropping” icons on your computer screen. I’m not a programmer so I don’t know if this is possible, but it would certainly bring vehicle design into the 21st century.

– a reader

Car Wars equipment can be drawn with arrays of rectangles on top of a polygon. The basic vehicle outline, spoiler, airdam, ramplate, etc. would also be drawn with polygons.

Here are screen shots from a programming toolkit that provides drawing functionality similar to Visio:

http://www.syncfusion.com/products/diagram/features/diagram_feat_25.aspx

http://www.syncfusion.com/products/diagram/features/diagram_feat_44.aspx

This toolkit has more features than we need. The trick is to strip it down and to make it expose only what we need and then adapt it to do the specialized needs of designing Car Wars stuff.

Notice the “Symbol Palette” on the left. These would have weapons and accessories in them. You would choose a vehicle outline when you open a new document. When an item is dragged onto the car, it should highlight an area for front, back, left, and right. When you drop the item, the program would know based on the item and the outline where exactly to place it and how big it should be.

Armor could be dragged on in 1, 5, 10, or 25 point increments. Alternately you could type in the amounts that you want… or nudge it in place with up/down tabs.

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Now if you really wanted to make it neat…

http://www.syncfusion.com/products/diagram/features/diagram_feat_43.aspx

You’d add a part to the program to allow users to draw their own weapon profiles… set their own costs, weights, DPs, and spaces… and then extend the palette as much as they want.

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The only catch is how long it would take to do it. Over-30 gamers may have more money than their teenaged counterparts, but the don’t have even a quarter as much free time… so its kinda hard to squeeze in projects into their schedule. (They hardly have time to get in a game of Ogre now and then… at least until their kids are old enough that they can pass that off as ‘quality time’!!)

Anyway… I’d estimate this project to take…

2 days to get a “proof of concept”
3 more to get it to do cars and cycles like the original black pocket box rules
3 more days to add in additional equipment that is used in the 5th edition
2 more days to address whatever gets pointed out by the testers and the initial users

So I’d say about 10 days total. But a working demo could be had in just 5– that would give you an in-color Combat Showcase diagram with any necessary charts and stats. Vehicle design should be faster and more intuitive than the usual spreadsheet approach.