HACCS - Heroscape Army Creator and Card Searcher

[Spuke Boy]

The HCS and later the HAC were my original projects I worked on for a long time, learning a lot about web programming at the same time. And as it usually happens when one learns more about something, I realized that the basic structures of those programs were difficult to keep up and update. So I started working on HACCS, a combination of the two: the Heroscape Army Creator and Card Searcher. I've been working on it for a long time now and have now managed to finish the Army Creating part in addition to the Card Searcher.

The accounts have been taken over from the HAC, so anyone with an account there can just sign in directly. The user armies have now been taken over, too!

HACCS (Heroscape Army Creator and Card Searcher)

An unfinished User Guide


Current Features:

• Search for any Heroscape cards
• Sort cards by anything
• Synergies offered and received, imposing synergies
• Create custom cards
• Create custom synergies
• Create and search armies

I'd be very happy to hear about any bugs or mistakes in the database, as well as suggestions and ideas for more features!

Feel free to ask any questions in this thread!

[Spuke Boy]

C3G Wave 24 added!

[Spuke Boy]

HoSS Super Secret Exclusives 2 and 3 added!

[Spuke Boy]

In the meantime, Martian Manhunter (II), Superman (III), Kang (II) and Batman (III) from C3G and Adventure Pack 2 from HoSS have been added!

[IshMEL]

Hey Spuke Boy, thanks for keeping this updated.

I see there's a function for "import customs" -- but it's not in the documentation. Is this a future feature? Also, will there be a way to share customs with / from other users?

[Spuke Boy]

Originally Posted by IshMEL

Hey Spuke Boy, thanks for keeping this updated.

I see there's a function for "import customs" -- but it's not in the documentation. Is this a future feature? Also, will there be a way to share customs with / from other users?

Yeah, the documentation is still very incomplete - I haven't found any time to add more sections to it unfortunately...

Basically you can copy/paste the SP of any of the C3G or HoSS cards into the import window to import that card quickly (it strips away the special power text on it's own). Sometimes there are some little things that aren't recognized completely, but it works very well most of the time.

Currently the only way to share customs with others is to export them, which outputs a format that is importable to HACCS. I plan on creating a better way to do it in the future, though I'm not entirely sure what the best approach would be, so I'm definitely open to suggestions.

I believe every feature currently visible apart from the army creation part should work fine, so if you or anyone else finds any bugs or wants to know how specific features work, then please ask!

[Spuke Boy]

Updated with Wave 25 from C3G!

[CJofCourse]

WOW. :O Just found this today. + rep. Can't wait for it to be finished!

[Xotli]

Okay, as promised, I'm going to post some thoughts here as I try to start using HACCS instead of HCS. Nothing here is meant to be a criticism, of course ... I'm just offering thoughts on potential improvements, as I see them.

So, the first thing I've done is to log in. This was not available the last time I tried HACCS (which was months and months ago), so I thought I needed to register. But apparently my login from HAC is also used here—might want to make that more clear.

I then went into Settings so I could check "VC" and hopefully it will remember that. At the bottom of the settings page there are several buttons. Each button "expands" the settings box to a list of things I can check or uncheck. Problem is, I have no idea what they represent from just the Settings box itself, and I didn't see an explanation in the user guide either (though of course I may have just missed it).

Bigger problem: given the default placement of the Settings window, several of the buttons expand to push things off the bottom of the screen. Then I realized I could drag the Settings window higher on the screen, to give it more room to expand downwards. But now the box is no longer expanding. So the expanded options just shoot past the bottom of the box, and are floating above the info in the panes underneath the Settings box, which makes them super hard to read. (Although, to be fair, if I mouse over them, a background will appear behind the individual checkbox items, so I can read them by moving the mouse over each item in the list. But that's still sub-optimal, of course.)

There's also no "save" or "apply" in the Settings box, so some folks might not realize that their settings are saved instantly and closing the box doesn't lose them. Contrariwise, there's actually no way not to save them, which I suppose some people might find irksome. Perhaps some sort of "revert" button? or at least a "return to factory defaults" or something?

That's all I'm seeing so far. I like the ranges of HACCS, personally—I think being able to put in "<=40" is better than having to put in "0" and "40" in HCS. Hopefully other users find that intuitive as well.

Great job, @Spuke Boy ! I'm looking forward to seeing the HAC features added in as well.

[Spuke Boy]

Originally Posted by Xotli

Okay, as promised, I'm going to post some thoughts here as I try to start using HACCS instead of HCS. Nothing here is meant to be a criticism, of course ... I'm just offering thoughts on potential improvements, as I see them.

First of all, thank you so much for the feedback! I really like all of your suggestions and have added them to my todo list for HACCS.

Originally Posted by Xotli

I then went into Settings so I could check "VC" and hopefully it will remember that. At the bottom of the settings page there are several buttons. Each button "expands" the settings box to a list of things I can check or uncheck. Problem is, I have no idea what they represent from just the Settings box itself, and I didn't see an explanation in the user guide either (though of course I may have just missed it).

I'm surprised that I never noticed that it doesn't have any explanation anywhere, I'll add a tooltip for it as soon as I get back to programming.
Anyhow, those checkboxes toggle the columns of the resulting figure tables. They are not saved in a cookie and are therefore reset on every refresh of the page.

Originally Posted by Xotli

Bigger problem: given the default placement of the Settings window, several of the buttons expand to push things off the bottom of the screen. Then I realized I could drag the Settings window higher on the screen, to give it more room to expand downwards. But now the box is no longer expanding. So the expanded options just shoot past the bottom of the box, and are floating above the info in the panes underneath the Settings box, which makes them super hard to read. (Although, to be fair, if I mouse over them, a background will appear behind the individual checkbox items, so I can read them by moving the mouse over each item in the list. But that's still sub-optimal, of course.)

Wow, I can't believe I never encountered that bug! How big is the resolution of your screen?
I think the best fix for this is to just give the settings popup a fixed height, so it will allow you to scroll instead of expanding the height.

Originally Posted by Xotli

That's all I'm seeing so far. I like the ranges of HACCS, personally—I think being able to put in "<=40" is better than having to put in "0" and "40" in HCS. Hopefully other users find that intuitive as well.

I'm glad you appreciate that feature, I was very happy myself when I finally got that to work.

[Leaf_It]

Thank you for making this tool. It's very helpful.

I have found only one bug so far.

If I am searching something, and I have a prompt pop up such as "insert species or parts of species. e.g. elf, human, droid" and I hit enter with that prompt visible, it will stay visible, and on top of everything on that tab in my browser, until I go back to the search, and put my cursor over the area that caused the prompt to appear in the first place.

Not a huge problem, but something that I encountered.

[Spuke Boy]

I'm very excited that I can finally announce the Army Creator of HACCS! It seems to be pretty stable right now, but obviously there could be many things I might have overlooked.

First of all, thanks @Xotli and @Leaf_It for your feedback, I fixed the bugs you guys encountered.

As the User Guide is still far behind, I'll explain most of the army features right here for now:
The fact that the Army Creator is available is quite obvious when you load the site, it should say "HAC - Local Army" and there should be an empty table in the right pane.

Creating Armies:

There are multiple ways of adding figures to the current army:

• type at least two characters in the input field for figures to be suggested
• double click a table row
• change the value of a spinner input
• drag the card in the middle pane to the left pane

The Local Army will be saved in a cookie, so you won't lose the army you have created. The army name can be edited by just clicking on the army name edit box in the header of the left pane.
Clicking the "Clear" button will clear the army from the cookie and you can create a new army. Clicking the "Export" button will give you the option to export the army to a nice human readable format or to the HexScape format.

When you're signed in you have the option to save your created army. After saving you can make it public if you want others to be able to find it.

Searching Armies:

Click the "Search" button in the left pane header to open the search popup. You can enter any information you want about the armies you are looking for. Currently it isn't possible to search for armies containing certain species, classes or factions, but you can search for armies containing a specific figure.
HACCS will only return armies containing figures from your selected Heroscape types, e.g. only Classic and VC.

I hope this can replace HAC just fine, so I'd love to hear about any bugs and new suggestions!