I’m very fond of the format that Catalyst Labs have created for their new BattleTech Record Sheets. I think they’re very stylish, and far, far better than the ones that the HeavyMetal program produces.
However, for our S&D campaign, it’s likely we’ll be modifying some of the mechs at some stage. How do you get a CL-style record sheet when there isn’t a program to do it?
Well, in my case, I write my own. I took one of the CL sheets in pdf format and extracted it as a high-definition image. I tinkered with it in an image editor to remove all the armour circles, weapons, critical hits areas and suchlike – so I had a blank sheet with only the outlines of where the data needed to go.
I’m now writing a Visual Basic program that loads this blank sheet onto a document and then populates it with the armour circles, weapons, heat sinks and the like. I’ve got the armour and weapon code finished, and they’re looking really good; still need to finish the code for internal structure, critical hits, heat sinks and ‘mech data – those shouldn’t be that difficult to do.
It’s looking really good! I’ll probably include a basic ‘mech creator into the code at some point (to verify the designs I put in there). I’m pretty happy.
As you can imagine, this program will be for my own private use only, for otherwise I’d get into a bunch of copyright problems.
Just an FYI but there is a great free mech editor called Solaris Skunk Werks.
http://www.solarisskunkwerks.com/
Works great. And if it ever doesn’t tell me about it. I happen to be one of the developers.
Brian
Thanks, Brian!