Seeking recommendations for my upcoming projects

[swrider]

So I am going out of town, again, for work next week. As I have come acustomed to doing I will be engaging in a few coding projects. Currently I am thinking of three and am looking for input form the community on them.

Shipping jobs board.
This board will have a list of jobs available. It will include; the items to be shipped, origin, destination, distance, legality of item, any opposition, difficulties, special conditions, and an NPC offering the job.

My idea is to have the jobs generate based off the rarity of the items. there will be more jobs available for more common items shipments.

Bounty list
this will be an online version of my excell bounty program I have previously built and several of you have seen.

Astrogation difficulty calculator.
This will be the most difficult but I'm thinking of being able to chose a starting grid or planet on the star wars Galaxy map and a destination and have it calculate the astrogation difficult and base times. This will feed into the bounty board and shipping board in the distance colum.

Key points
For both of the boards I hope to set up the ability to save the generated list and provide a URL to the person generating it. My hope is to set it up to automatically delete lists after a month. (Trying to think of a way to allow users to reset the 30 days if it is still being used).


Questions
Which of these would you like to see first?
What features would you like to see included in these programs?
Any other programs you would like to see?
Anything else you wish to share.

[ShadoWarrior]

I have an app that user "Nevermind" from the FFG board wrote that calculates travel times and costs between any two systems ... for hundreds of planets. It also adjusts for the results of astrogation checks (advantages and triumphs) and faster or slower drives. A quick check of my stored PMs at FFG reveals that he's not been on that site since mid-July of last year, so I suspect it's now an orphaned, never-to-be-finished app.

AN app that combined both computing a dice pool and the times between two points would be a monumental undertaking. The dice pool portion being, by far, the most difficult aspect. What's on a hyperlane? (The maps tend to only show the biggest ones, not the 2-3 classes of smaller lanes.) There are many planets that are on some sort of lane, but you only know this if you very carefully read their Wookieepedia entries, as they don't show these lanes on most galactic maps.

[SavageBob]

What Shado suggests does sound really cool and useful. And it sounds like the astrogation app would feed into the bounties and cargoes projects, so it would make sense to tackle it first. With hundreds (if not thousands) of named planets, though, I imagine this would be a major undertaking. Perhaps you could figure out some way to troll Wookieepedia for data, like what planets are on what trade routes, or in what sectors.

[swrider]

My idea is to create the framework for the astrogation system, planets rade routes etc and a page to add new planets and hyperlanes.

Then I would only need to enter the pertinet ones for my game to verrifiy it works and allow poeple to upload planets expanding the database over time.

[SavageBob]

Ah, that's a great idea. GMs can do the legwork, indicating somehow what quadrant a planet is on, what trade routes it may lie on, etc. You just need to put the infrastructure in place.

[swrider]

Shado, with the astrogation PDF you use do what do you consider to be a hex? Is it one grid on the galactic map?

[DeepSpacer]

I'd prefer to see a Shipping Jobs Board. I like the 'special conditions', but maybe add 'twists' or 'complications'. Bounties all seem to have the same outcome, so I prefer shipping jobs.

Bounties could have a 'true motivation' add-on. I assume Jobs & Bounties are to give GM's ideas.

I used this Astrogation calculator webpage. http://www.swcombine.com/navcomp/
You could perhaps do one with a database of planets, by name, and not a map. Or, copy a galaxy map and work from there.

[ShadoWarrior]

Shado, with the astrogation PDF you use do what do you consider to be a hex? Is it one grid on the galactic map?

I don't use that document's hex thing. At all. Never have. You're the first person to ever ask about it. Grids on the galactic map (well, the very detailed one that I use -- there's more than one gridded map on the web) are often more than a sector in size. Pretty sure that the guy who wrote that PDF didn't intend for hexes to be that big.

[ShadoWarrior]

I used this Astrogation calculator webpage. http://www.swcombine.com/navcomp/
You could perhaps do one with a database of planets, by name, and not a map. Or, copy a galaxy map and work from there.

Just so you know, the map(s) I use, and the app that references the same map(s), have a LOT more planets than what SWCombine has on theirs.

[swrider]

I have been thinking a lot about this and think that I am going to wait on the astrogation calculator. The reason is that the RAW rules for astrogation are to vague to turn into a program and I am not a huge fan of the home-brewed systems I have seen. I did spend some time coming up with my own that is much easier to calculate and to program, but feel it a waste to spend a bunch of time programming something that many people will simply overlook because they don't like my house rule.