BattleBlog от 23.03.2011

[DeJaVu]

Как всегда, чтобы не нарушать букву закона, поскольку переводить мне категорически лень, выкладываю тут, а не в новостях.

The evolution of a MUL
"What exactly is a MUL?"

"Isn't it a rare Kyotan bird with a stylized feather pattern that looks almost like a helmet?"

"Nah, it stands for 'Master's Universal Language', people kept getting tired of typing out Manus Dominus as the language of the Manei Domini."

"You're all wrong! It stands for 'Mostly Useless Lists!"

Well it certainly isn't the first two (though a bird with a mullet is something I'd pay Brent to draw) and I desperately hope it won't end up becoming the latter.

Now before you get confused, you may want to go here and download the PDF. It will help you understand the differences between "The MUL" and the "MUL: BV list"

(Disclaimer- This is a long one folks)

Master Unit List. In the last two years, the MUL has become such a well trod name that what started out as an internal development project title has become the defacto name for the final output of the project. In a recent email I was arguing that today's release should just be called "BattleTech Master Battle Value List", with no reference to MUL. To me the MUL was still a project, not a product. I saw output from the MUL project being used in products but not called the MUL. Ben Rome nicely summed it all up "Like it or not, we've created the MUL brand and trying to redirect it now isn't going to go over well."

And Ben was right. Just the confusion the first release of the product name (Master Unit List: Battle Value 1.0) cause confusion over if we had suddenly thrown out BV 2.0 and gone back to BV 1.0. So trying to call a spade anything but a spade would not work.

But that still doesn't really cover what exactly the MUL is.

As mentioned in the credits, the ancestry of the MUL goes all the way back to the release of Tech Manual (in 2007). At that time Herb Beas tapped Rick Remer to lead a small team of people who would
go through and generate Battle Value 2.0 for all the units in the game. Still just a play tester, I was one of that small team of volunteers. We all thought it was a three month project, six months tops. I mean "how hard could it be"?

I've grown to loathe those five words. On the surface it looked simple. Just take the units and run the formulas, simple, easy, fast.

None of the above.

There were no automated tools*, so first thing that happened was a mad scramble of excel as a dozen of us all tackled a way to make some kind of automation (When I started on the BV 2.0 project I knew very little about excel. Today I'm considered an expert user who does 'weird shit' with the program. MUL's fault). With makeshift tools, and even pencil and paper, we started tackling the list of units. Then we compared notes and wow…

Sometimes, no amount of playtesting can prepare you for reality. BV 2.0 was extensively playtested. People understood the system, they tested it out, they felt it worked. But what had not ever been done, was for people to compare notes. As the BV 2.0 team dug into it, with a more robust team to review, we realized there were inconsistencies. One issue was just wording where one sentence meant something different to several people. So the BV 2.0 team became the body that ended up essentially updating portions of the BV 2.0 rules to what we jokingly called BV 2.1. Somewhere along the way I became the BV expert. When real life overtook Rick, I moved into leading the team and driving the extensive BV errata that has been published.

And we still didn't have a BV 2.0 list.

So we tried a new approach. At the same time it became clear Catalyst needed its own Faction List. The popular fan based list (Commonly called the La Casse list) hadn't been updated in years and didn't reflect any of the new publications. So we decided to combine the BV 2.0 list and the Faction List . We still didn't have BV results and now we were faced with something new.

"Just what is the official list of BattleTech units? Which ones have record sheets? Which ones are correctly built."

Twenty Five years of BattleTech can lead to many wonderful things. It can also lead to hundreds of thousands of references to combat units, to many generations of rules, to different editions of the same record sheets and to down right errors. "Holy guacamole, Batman! We're going to have to rebuild every unit under Total Warfare, just to make sure they are legal, then generate BV." "Yes, Robin, and we need to create a comprehensive list of every unit in the universe, so we know what needs to be fact checked."

Enter the first ever mention of the "Master Unit List." It was the title of a tab on my main tracking spreadsheet for the project. All it was, was a list of unit names. That wouldn't last long.

Then Strategic Operations came along and BattleForce entered the equation. Toss that on the pile of things to do, no problem.

We had started to make progress. The sterling efforts of people like Johannes Heidler, Dan Isberner and Michael Binder jumped us forward on the BV front for BA, Protos and combat vehicles. On another front I had developed a relationship with some java coders. They just happened to work on a fan project that made a combat simulator for BattleTech. For their fan project to work, they had to program the complete construction rules into the simulator. This included BV. So after a chat with Randall (He was still in a hands on role for this project), we issued NDAs and welcomed these coders as special "fact checkers." They got access to Catalyst developers, to answer rules questions, and we got a computer program that was Total Warfare rules compliant and BV 2.0 compliant. Progress! Well except for aerospace, but hey it was progress. I finally felt we would be able to release a BV 2.0 list for at least the core units of the game. ASF would have to be done by hand and DropShips and WarShips were still a ways out, but we were making progress.

With BV 2.0 starting to look like a reality, I started tackling the other issues. The Faction List was horribly out of date and as we dug into it, we realized it was also wrong in a lot of places. So with Herb's blessings I went out recruiting people who were faction experts. Either a specific faction or like Roland Boshnack, just a man who knows way to much about BattleTech. We had a list of all the known units in the game, even the really weird and obscure references. By this time I'd realized the project was more than BV and officially we started calling it the Master Unit List. I had a loose collection of volunteers helping me and they became the MUL Team. We had a mission and we were executing!

Now comes the kicker!

Randall IMs me, "So, do you think the MUL would allow us to update the Objective Raids series?"

I should have uninstalled Trillian right then and there. But no, silly me I said "We'd need to add some resources, but I think it can be done."

So off I went to have MadCapellan vetted and put under NDA (technically Randall beat me to the punch on it and had Herb do that. Randall was a giddy about the idea; him and his kitchen sink approach to BattleTech). With MC on the MUL team, we made the final expansion to the MUL project and started adding in factory data.

Then we got a little side tracked. With eleven of the most game knowledgeable people under NDA, the MUL team as a single entity could answer nearly any BattleTech question at the speed of email. They became the special fact check team for the XTRO project and then TRO3085. Today the MUL Team has become integral to the process of product creation along side writing, development, editing, art, fact checking, proofing, and so on, all with the goal of creating superior quality books. For those of you that have noticed a continual increase in the quality of BT products, you can thank Herb.

Still, we finally made it!

MASTER UNIT LIST: Battle Value
Today we released the first product to use the MUL project data. I won't repeat the introduction, go read it in the PDF (it's free!). For those of you that have looked at the PDF, you'll have noticed that only a fraction of what I've just discussed is in here. Very true! This is the first product to release with data from the MUL master database.

While this is the first public exposure of the MUL, the data in it helped to make the Field Reports possible as well as other Jihad related projects coming in the future. For the first time in BattleTech development memory, there was a single comprehensive list of all factories and what was known to be built at them. It makes fact checking easy and keeps us from accidentally making a new unit at a factory that was bombed two decades ago.

Moving forward we have many hopeful plans for the MUL. One of the next products we plan to release, will be a Master BattleForce list. After that we are exploring several options for making the vast data available to you, the fans.

It's been an incredible journey. One that taught us a lot about the game, the rules and the incredible dedication BattleTech's fans.

Thank you to all and we hope the MUL: Battle Value will be a useful tool for your BattleTech games.

Best,
Joel Bancroft-Connors
On behalf of the Catalyst Development Staff and the Master Unit List Team


*- When this project began, Heavy Metal Pro had not issued any of it's BV patches. Rick Raisley was very helpful and did release BV 2.0 patches for HMP and HMVee. Unfortunately he couldn't add the TW era equipment (HPPC, MMLs, Plasma Cannons, etc) and the way HMAero was built it couldn't be upgraded to BV 2.0