Combat Tracker - Advice and Suggestions

[shadzar]

interesting thought, write a ruleset that doesn't have a combat tracker that makes the system more versatile you say...

[CrawlingChaox]

Who is participating in this event? This is English.
Who are the actors in this event? This is not English.

I know you're not talking with me here, but I'll take the chance of not being bound to the strict professionalism damned is showing, but only by the rules of common decency and forum parlance, to say this flatly. You're universalizing (very) debatable positions, it's irritating, and you should stop of you want anyone to take your points seriously.
Aside from it being perfectly good English (a little bit on the technical side, maybe), "actor" is a piece of jargon that is way more common than you seem to realize. You have a point if you're saying that the interface should move away from jargon, but you're failing to realize that every game ever made, along with every piece of software ever written, has some form of jargon. What you're saying, in a context where words like CT, AC, THAC0, FG, condition, effect all have their own specific meaning, "I don't like this word which everyone else seems to get, so you should remove it because I'm obviously right". The criticism might have some merit, but the delivery is awfully self-centered. For some, the term "actor" has a very specific meaning which points directly to the entity being represented in the combat tracker, the entity in the software as opposed to the character in itself. "Participant" or "combatant" would be more ambiguous.

well again, please provide me ANYTHING outside of FG that is "combat tracker" focused int he RPG world. I can provide you with thousands of adventures, campaigns, etc that are map focused dating back to the 70s, as well as non-RPGs that use turn-based combat dating back to the 50s, and some even to the 1700s and 1800s.

If your examples are going back to the 1700s, I can only suppose you didn't quite grasp what I meant by "map-based", since I was referring to a way to process a set of rules in a digital environment, and digital environments tended to be quite scarce 300 years ago.

so if you have a combat spanning multiple maps, i can't see where the problem you mention is, unless you mean a single combat that requires more than one map because FG has a limit to map size that it supports? Unity should solve that with being 64-bit capable and allow for larger maps, more zoom depth, etc. Though I agree it is and will remain a problem for FG Classic, that will probably go unresolved.

if you mean something other than that, you will have to explain further about your multi-map combats.

High resolution maps are often split into multiple files. Such is the case, for instance, for Castle Ravenloft maps that can be bought online. Currently, I can use a single CT to play a fight which goes on on multiple adjacent floors of the castle (on a staircase, for example). In a map-based system, I would have to prepare each map separately and make sure that initiatives on each map-based tracker are the same, and I would have to be careful not to create duplicate entities, etcetera. This might not be what you mean, but it's what you're saying.
I could get around that issue by making all levels in a dungeon part of the same file, but (a) as you said, there is a significant memory limit; (b) I would have to manually adjust the camera way more often; (c) even if the program could handle it, it would only amount to a lot lf work to be done in the off-chance my players decided to fight on a flight of stairs or another passage, work that with the current system isn't even needed, and it would only be there to please someone who has the idea that RPGs are somehow "map-based" and they didn't want to follow the very simple thought process that led things to be as they are.
I'm all for criticism meant to improve, but that should be coupled with understanding how how things work in the first place. I'm not inclined to believe that's been the case in this discussion.

[Moon Wizard]

I'm going to go ahead and close this discussion, as it has served its purpose.

Any suggestions for improvements to the software can be added to the link in my signature below for tracking.

Thanks,
JPG