If I had the money I'd buy the old VL coding..
but damn $2000?
What is the minister smokin? lol
Although not very marketable, that is not much for the time it takes to bang this out from scratch. I've spent countless hours on my little endeavour and I couldn't guess how many thousands of lines of code I have in it. But this is just a hobby for me and I've never thought about getting paid for it. Of course I don't think I'd ever give it away either. =\
Definitely looks interesting and promising, I enjoy both ladders and planetary leagues. While we usually have plenty ladder leagues popping up when a game becomes popular (MW4 heyday, plenty of leagues to choose from), a good planetary league is a rarity due to its more complex nature. NBTM/HC has been a very good planetary league (good job by DP), but if there are more good ones, I definitely would be interested.
I always think the more leagues, the merrier. It only means that the leagues will be pushed to offer higher quality with strong rules implementation and discipline. Majority of decent people will tend to pick and stay longer in leagues that are solid and run with strong hands if they have the options to choose from.
Taken from your website: http://www.lancecommand.com/
"If we actually get the league up and running, we may go ahead and complete the original Mechwarrior 4 design"
Do you have a more specific detail on it, that is not confidential. I would be interested to read the rule set if you already have a draft of it.
Btw, I used to enjoy VL a lot during the heyday of MW4, I wonder if XFracture is thinking to come back and restart VL 
Thanks, I'm glad you are interested. I apologize for the current poor look and function of the site. Since there was something of a demand for Firefox users I've been trying to get it displaying correctly in that browser. CSS compliance is a crock of crap. And unfortunately, my rule set has not been transfered from my head to electronic media. I have quite a few yellow pads though.
Honestly, I've spent a lot of time just trying to figure out what I was thinking years ago when I put the bulk of this together. It's also been slow going as I have rewritten much of the code for streamlining, new PHP revisions, and a new server, and I don't have all the bugs worked out. I can tell you that I had most of the engine written up to the point of designing a battle interface, which I thought was pretty snazzy. It looks VERY similar to the drop screen from MW4, where you choose your lancemates, etc. I had tried to implement as much of the MW4 look and feel into the league design. It all worked on the back end using manual edits to the database (for the most part), but the front end GUI had not been completed.
The league also is not a planetary league, per se. It's not really a ladder either. If you really need an idea of what it's like, think of it as a war game simulator, almost a training tool. There is no official BattleTech related territory that is fought over. When a person wants to generate a campaign, he has an interface controlling certain aspects of the scenario by establishing limits on the randomizing engine. For example maybe he wants a very mountainous campaign, a coastal campaign, deserts, alpine, etc, possibly with sharp altitude changes, as well as the size and shape of the campaign map. The map is made up of hexes, each of which represents a different map in the game. Some hexes are considered impassable (for land craft only), including extreme alpine and deep water. I implemented different map shapes (triangles, inverted triangles, hexagons, rectangles) in case I wanted to find a way to link campain maps together in such a way that you could simulate an actual spherical object and actual ground warfare/strategy to take the whole thing. That part I couldn't quite get to work out.
Basically a player (with proper team priveleges) would create a campaign to his liking (you can run the randomizer over and over until you get a map that looks just right). He determines maximum teams allowed (within map limits), minimum teams allowed, whether or not it is a private campaign or an open one, etc. That campaign would then sit idle and untouched until the start criteria is met. Each team is randomly dropped into one of the bases on the map, which have been placed according to what I considered to be logical positioning factors (for example, if the map generated a hex surrounded by several impassable hexes, it would register that as a likely candidate for the engine to drop a base. Cities and industrial areas are selected in similar ways. Your team would drop with mechs and other vehicles selected from your team's inventory, which remains persistent from campaign to campaign. Basically you would move from hex to hex according to the movement allowed for whatever vehicle(s) you have selected, taking control of those territories. Lighter mechs, vehicles, and infantry obviously could travel farther than assault class objects, but you would be limited by your slowest object in the group. As you locate your enemies you can choose to fight, run, whatever. A lot of strategy is involved based on the actual geography of the map, as well as the economic value of each territory controlled. One of the options selected in the campaign creation is whether you want to have an open map, as though photographed from orbit, or a scenario with localized radar, which I thought would be much more fun. Teams would have the option of forming alliances for the campaign. The campaign would continue until all enemies were eliminated.
The persistent economy is based on "resource credits" (which was part of my contribution to VL's design) earned for territories controlled in campaigns, via sales on the black market, salvage, personal earnings in Solaris-style arena matches, etc. Both players and teams maintain their own credits as well as their own equipment inventories. A player can choose to allow their team to use equipment and/or credits from their personal inventory. The system is kind of cool...it actually tracks each individual unit of equipment, even as it is sold or salvaged from player to player. Each piece of equipement carries with it its battle history, a name bestowed upon it by its previous owner, all damage, etc. I love the fact that you can possibly salvage your enemy's mech and use it against him in the next fight, even keeping the name he gave it, haha!
Would be a nice thing to rub in his face in the forums at the end of the day, and gives salvage almost something of a "trophy" value.
I think the last major item I was working on was a persistent weather system, which would actually move and change across the map similar to real weather. If I remember correctly it was in real time, with a day and a night cycle. I had thought about changing this up, considering the fact that some of us have limited hours to play, and could be stuck playing in the same cycle all the time. Most of the match settings are pretty much determined by the system at the time of the drop.
There is territorial strategy, but also the ladder-like concept of personal/team victories and wealth. So, like I said...it's somewhere in between. Best way to think of it is a war game simulator, and all your mechwarrior buddies go have a drink together at the end of the day.
Anyway, that's the gist of it. The thing really started out as a system I was designing in which individual Corps (sub-units) within the 88th could compete against each other in a non-ladder fashion. It kind of blew up past that when I wrote the script for the map generator...
Hope that helps!
