Gary Jones

As it’s now officially been made public that I’ve been made in to a developer for Battrick, I can now share my thoughts on developments for my own spreadsheets and tools.

Due to the obvious conflict of interest, unfortunately I will have to stop any further development of the tools that I have created. I may do the odd bug-fix to keep them working the way they were originally intended, but I won’t be updating any formulae and here’s why: if I’ve seen a formula in the Battrick code and I know the version in my spreadsheet is wrong, then a) I can’t update the spreadsheet because that would give the formulae away, and b) I can’t release new versions of the spreadsheet knowing that the formulae are incorrect, as I would feel that is also wrong.

I hope that the tools and spreadsheets that have been created are stable enough not to need any critical fixes, and I will continue to host them on this site until such time that they are no longer being downloaded.

In terms of my role at Battrick, my focus will be on the quality of the front-end code, which means most of the stuff I do, you shouldn’t really notice, unless it’s a new feature. I aim to improve the accessibility and usability of the site, and generally make it a nicer experience. The easier it is to use the site, the less it gets in the way of playing the game. I won’t have much, if any, role of developing the “game”, only the “site” which serves the game.

In terms of game development ideas, reporting of bugs etc, I ask that you use the existing features within Battrick to do so, rather than posting them here.

Over the last few days I’ve been helping to do some work on a new spreadsheet for the Battrick game I play. Someone (zinc) had found a highly accurate formula to work out the un-displayed sub levels of players, based on their wage, and this spreadsheet made use of that formula.

After a few intermediate versions, and updates, we released the first official version of Talent-Finder yesterday.

It was soon apparent though that due to the macro code in Excel being different to that supported by Open Office (a free open-source version of office software), some people wouldn’t be able to use it. Today then, was about rewriting the back-end code from one language that I’m not particularly good with anyway, into another language which I’ve never used before!. In short, it’s now complete, so all Battrick managers have a chance to use the fantastic resource we’ve created, and it’s added to all the other Battrick Resources.