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Woos -> WitpDecoder; Now providing some overview (11/15/2006 12:56:25 AM)
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As discussed elsewhere I was a bit displeased with the GUI of WitP which doesn't deliver lots of necessary information at all or only after several clicks (and thus hints at Mr. Grisby being a quite bad UI designer).
Solution at first: Maintain several spread sheets by hand. Bad! Why am I doing work a computer is much better at?
Solution now: WitpDecoder!
WitpDecoder will read your savegame file, extract information into an SQL-Database, collect it over several turns and display it in a (hopefully) easily accessible way to you. Currently it provides:
- Overview of stocks, production, usage, ... of all 'strategic resources' like engines.
- List of units moving and/or preparing for a certain base (basically impossible to get that in-game since all units on ships vanish from the in-game lists)
- List of leaders with all attributes shown and custom rating formulas definable
- List of ships to be updated at a date (and their current location)
- List of ship classes to select the best ones for a TF.
- List of leaders assigned to more than one unit/TFs and other inconsistencies (Yeah, you finally can see the leaderbug ;-)
And all that for not 10, not 7, not 5, no only 2.6 MB download from http://extweb.retsiemuab.de/witp/witpDecoder0.4.zip (most of it used up by the SWT and HSQLDB jar files and libraries). More instructions in the witpDecoder-docs.pdf file (also in the .zip file). Read that documentation!
Now updated to V0.4c. Main new feature is the Map Overview Tab which gives info on search coverage, ship repair utilization and support levels. Download the updated .jar file, rename it to witpDecoder2.jar and overwrite your current .jar file with it.
Note that when you want to report errors you do not have to screengrab the popup windows. Most error reports can be found as text in the witpdecoder.log file.
Collection of basecluster files provided by users (also included in the zip file):
Below some screenshots to wet your appetite.
[image]local://upfiles/16906/1C751AFEDC59478CAC959F7FBC5200B0.gif[/image]
Oh, before I forget. Some restrictions.
- You need Java 1.5.
- New functionality gets added from time to time. Expect bugs. And expect database changes in future versions to come without an automatic upgrade mechanism (so keep your safe files).
- Do use the "Quit" menu to leave (and not the "Close Window" X-button). Otherwise the database will never clean up and things will quickly become awfully slow.
- Reading in a save file is slow with only minimal feedback. Don't despair. It does not hang. Really. Remember, you need a fast computer for WitP turn execution anyway ;-)
Known bugs:
- Coral Sea Scenario does not work with witpDecoder (and probably never will). It uses the Truk base as Headquarter for the Truk Base Force, which can not easily be modeled within witpDecoder.
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