Pointless. Madcat sprite from Megamek.

You might know your side charts, but flipping between them every roll is harder than you think…

I was playing a pickup game with a friend the other week when a mutual friend and illustration student started taking shots at the quality of our game materials, or more specifically our map sheet, crinkled and worn. Sure it’d seen better days but at least the art is…. actually,  I’m not even a fan of the art, and I never was. In fact, it’s about time I stopped being displeased and actually do something about it.

Here’s version 1.

Thanks to Google’s image search API, Sheets will now include an image of the selected unit. This functionality isn’t fool proof, so erroneous images (or none at all) might show up. To compensate you can click on the image to cycle through a few results. Interface-wise there’s a new, small, control bar in the bottom right where the print and full screen commands can be found. Also, for those on a small screen, record sheets can be dragged around the screen in order to see all of their parts. Lastly, I’ve made a few fixes to a few weapon stats (IS AC5, Streak 6, and medium pulse laser).

On a side note, flash security measures prevent typing into text fields while a SWF is full screen, so if you move back to the unit list view Sheets will return to windowed mode. It’s a bummer, but there’s not much I can do about it at the moment…

Enjoy!

Results are in and can be viewed here. For graphs and charts go to Form > Show summary of responses (though it stopped working just now…). For the record this survey captures, if anything, the stats of a slice of the online Battletech community. In the future it’d be good to get some info on the people these individuals play with out in the real world.

I was a little surprised (and afterwards surprised I was surprised) at the dearth of younger and less experienced players. There’s any number of obvious  explanations for this so I’ll not conjecture too much. Suffice to say if you’re here (or out there) you’re probably experienced and there’s a good chance you’re responsible more often than not for running games.

Another note worthy item is the significant amount of people who play primarily online. As far as I know Megamek is the only venue for this.

Update:

PDF of results.