Pilot Mode v3 and next steps

Hello, everyone!

A few v3 updates and future plans, as well as details about submitting your own achievements to COMP/CON

Pilot Mode v3

I'm pleased to report that Pilot Mode has been fully(-ish) ported to v3 and its upgraded tech stack. The only pieces that remain are cross-feature functionality, namely some data management stuff related to detecting changes to save, some new types of image storage and their scaffolding, some v2 porting, and a few other new features that I'll have to come back to after they're better fleshed out elsewhere. Also a handful of minor UI tweaks here and there that I'll save for a thorough polish pass.

As per usual, this can be poked at at the dev preview: https://cc-dev-preview.netlify.app/ 

v2 Updates & Fixes

My immediate next work will be back in v2, addressing some outstanding bugs and prepping some upcoming LANCER content. v3 work will slow down temporarily while I address that, but it shouldn't take too long

v3 Print Updates

The next major piece of v3 will be printed material support. I'll be breaking this into three big chunks.

Pilots will get the following modes (at least):

• minimal - as barebones as possible, aiming to fit everything you need on a single letter-sized sheet
• terse - what we've got in v2, but cleaned up and better formatted
• standard - a bigger, graphical sheet that starts at parity with the Core Book character sheet
• expanded - a multi-page character dossier suitable for tracking a character over a campaign or career
• cards - a printable deck of action cards and stat trackers, in the style of 4E Power Cards, kind of

These will all be fairly configurable and optionally include things like a printable combat quick reference sheet or a page with full information for your pilot's relevant tags

NPCs will get minimal, terse, and standard sheets, but they can also be collected into encounters, which will collect an encounter's NPC instances. These will be able to be split into a standard collection of NPCs and encounter info, but also a streamlined split trackers/info view that I've been working on for a little bit. It's still hazy now in terms of exact implementation, but as a LANCER GM myself this is how I've found myself gravitating towards handling encounters, especially after you've gotten a few of them under your belt. I'll make this available as soon as I can in the encounter tools rebuild process for comments and criticisms, but I think it'll be particularly useful for seasoned GMs.

Finally, Campaign mode will get an extensive set of print options that I'll save for its own post later on in the development process.

v3 Mobile Views

If you've been on the dev preview site on a mobile device, you'll probably have noticed that it's almost entirely unusable in small-format views. This will change! I'm reworking how C/C will detect and handle small-width screens, because a lot of the more stylistic elements of COMP/CON aren't really suitable for the format and can often make it frustrating to use. In v3, there will be a set of screen targets, with their own constituent UI elements.

This sounds like a lot of work, but in reality it's not too far beyond what C/Cv2 is doing now, only in a way that'll be easier to iterate on and maintain. The tradeoff is that there'll be less graphical flourish in the mobile mode(s), but I think that's probably for the better.

The goal is to provide a widescreen mode (current desktop styling), a mobile mode (portrait phones), and a middle mode (small screens and landscape phones), with the middle mode being the minimum target for full GM-side functionality.

v3 Roadmap

Beyond the v2 updates, my next steps for v3 are as follows:

• Finish Pilot print updates
• Finalize v3 NPC data
• Rebuild NPC roster
• Build instancing engine and save data structure for Pilot and NPC instances
• Rebuild Encounter tools

This sounds like a lot of work, but I have laid *a lot* of groundwork over the past few months, so hopefully I should be able to knock these out in a pretty reasonable timeframe

Achievements

There will be an achievement-related post published immediately after this that will include details about C/C user-submitted achievements, including timelines, implementation details, and a submission form. If you are subscribed to the Patreon at any level you will see another post (a few minutes later) with a different patrons-only submission form.

Patron submissions will make it in to the app, although you and I might have to work together to ensure that submissions are tonally and/or mechanically appropriate -- but we'll keep hacking away at it until you get something in.

Non-patron submissions will be included the same way eg. HORUS chat was: if it's appropriate and clever/interesting/funny/etc (as determined by me). I'm going to do my best to get as many in as is reasonable, but, cannot 100% guarantee one of yours will be included.

That's it for update stuff, see you in a few minutes at the achievements post!

Beef