General

Today was Miller7219's first visit to #harpgamer on irc.stratsims.com to chat and flesh out the H3 Paper Project a bit. We were joined for various intervals by StalinTC, Reckall, Brains, Herman, and Jason. My goals were to get to know Miller7219 a little bit to make sure this whole crazy scheme might work and to answer his questions. I came away thinking this could work. We undertook an initial analysis of the two turn types, Intermediate Turns of 10 minute duration and Tactial Turns of 30 seconds composed to two 15 second halfs (see rule 2.3). Brains brought up the thought that there may be no benefit to acknowledging the existence of Intermediate Turns s…

The HC Next Gen forums are available to anyone with a HarpGamer account and might at some point be opened to anonymous visitors. This creates some difficult situations: Intellectual Property Protection - Specifically the Harpoon 3 Paper Rules, Annexes, and Supplements. Whenever possible do not quote vast swaths of the rules or pages of platform data. Reference the rule or data reference instead (ex. See 4.2.1.2, ex. Rule 4.2.1.2, ex. Rule 4.2.1.2 Submarine Astern Movement, ex. Annex D Aster 15). Mr. Bond is very encouraging, tolerant, and understanding of such discussions, let's not take unfair advantage of his approach. If you need to stamp your posts with certain cop…

Welcome to the HC Next Gen/H3 Paper Adaptation Project(s). I'll flesh this out over the coming days and weeks but we're endeavouring to make the next leap happen for Harpoon Classic in the form of a re-write into a modular system that can accept a range of rules plugins. The first ruleset will be H3 Paper followed by a HCE-style ruleset for backwards compatibility with HCE. The look will most likely resemble the UnitWindow DLL. Forum Layout: General - used for early idea development, random questions, pats on the back, and such. Game Mechanics/Rules - once ideas are fairly well developed they can be summarized and further developed there. Database Desig…

Thread for discussion of the game style to use for the H3 Paper ruleset. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_vs....-based_gameplay has some background and some of the possibilities. Also note our initial IRC discussion on the topic

What should this endeavour be named? To get specific there are two projects here. 1. The revamping of the Harpoon Classic (HC) game in all likelyhood starting from scratch and borrowing existing code and ideas where they are useful. This forms more of a platform or gaming system where you plug in game rules and models rather than a complete game itself (think Vassal but not so much). 2. The first ruleset for the above platform will be a rather close adaptation of the H3 Paper rules. So far I've called #1 HC Next Gen and #2 the H3 Paper Conversion. The first can easily be abbreviated to HCNG but the second imho is just a miserable name in that it will be…

Let's brainstorm how to represent the various stages of the tactical turn game-wise. While they are fairly clearly delineated in the rules book I'm having a difficult time converting that flow to actual practice (such as, shouldn't the plotting phase really be part of the previous 15-second interval...).

Intermediate Turns - Well, I think we will back to discussing them down the line, because I believe thier implemnetation in some fashion will be the key to adding a strategic element to Computer Harpoon -CH (or whatever we end up calling it!). At it's core Harpoon is a tactical game not strategic. Assets have already been positioned within a few hundred NMs (or less) of one another and it's time to hunt and kill! Everyone knows the enemy is in the general area, but where exactly and how best to use the technology/weapons at hand on the platforms within the group? Maneuver, patience, luck....that's all of what paper Harpoon was/is. The strategic nature of Harpoon can …