Codex Tracking Spreadsheet

All 3 features have been added! Bug Reports are strongly encouraged.

There are now quick deck selection menus for your own deck and your opponents deck just to the right of where you enter your deck choices.

Below the peek, discard and draw functions, there are now 2 fields which govern Skipping Discard/Draw and drawing extra cards for Shrine of Forbidden Knowledge (either 1 or 2 extra, for 1 or 2 active shrines)

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First time poster, long time lurker of this forum, and as a fellow programmer, I must say these spreadsheets are amazing !

I’m eager to start playing PbF soon, but I thought coming over here and say “Thank you for the amazing gaming tool!” was necessary :slight_smile: .

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I’m really surprised this hasn’t been mentioned before (or perhaps it has, but then I’m surprised it hasn’t been fixed):

The script generating the forum post doesn’t quite do it right. The title of the “buildings” section doesn’t display correctly - instead of showing as bold, you see the code disaplyed instead. I don’t know why this happens, but it is easily fixed manually each time by inserting a line break just before it. It would be much less annoying if the script did this automatically. (This can’t be peculiar to me because I have seen this in others’ PBF posts as well.)

It’s hardly a priority because it doesn’t affect the game itself, so most players probably don’t even notice it. But it must be very quick to fix, and it does annoy those of us with OCD tendencies :slight_smile:

The spreadsheet as a whole is great though, and I am very grateful that it exists.

I do have OCD tendencies, so I am certain I would find that equally annoying! That said, I am not reproducing it at the moment… Link or post to an example?

It occured to me that perhaps the issue had to do with the blank line created between in play and buildings. There is an asterisk there even when no cards are in the back line because of how this forum interprets blank lines. Basically, the in play and buildings are read as headers and expect lines with text in between, or two blank lines. I chose to always have the line of text (using the lonely asterisk) so that the board info block could be continuous but seperated from the economy block by a blank line


[B]Board Info:[/B]
[B]In Patrol:[/B]

  • :psblueshield: [I]Squad Leader[/I]:
  • :psfist: [I]Elite[/I]:
  • :ps_: [I]Scavenger[/I]:
  • :pschip: [I]Technician[/I]:
  • :target: [I]Lookout[/I]:
    [B]In Play:[/B]

[B]Buildings:[/B]

  • :heart: Base HP: 20

[B]Economy Info:[/B]
[B]Cards:[/B]

  • Hand: 0
  • Deck: 0
  • Disc: 0
    [B]Gold:[/B]
  • Gold:
  • Workers: 5

It could also have been

[B]In Play:[/B]
[B]Buildings:[/B]

  • :heart: Base HP: 20

But I wanted to make sure it was easy to tell the back line was empty

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Looking back through the only thread I’ve played PBF in so far, you can see examples at Casual: Hobusu vs robinz - #84 by Hobusu, Casual: Hobusu vs robinz - #82 by Hobusu, Casual: Hobusu vs robinz - #80 by Hobusu, Casual: Hobusu vs robinz - #62 by Hobusu - and doubtless more if I go further back. You’ll notice that all of these are posts by @Hobusu rather than me, because this error was coming up on preview in virtually every one of my posts - this is why on every one of my posts (or at least nearly every one), there is a blank line between the “in play” section and the “buildings” section, because this appears to fix the problem.

I’ve just looked through other recent PBF threads at random, and found examples at Casual IsotopeX [MonoGreen] vs. Eijolend [MonoRed] - #40 by Eijolend, Casual: Shax(mRed/mGreen/mRed) vs Hobusu (mGreen/mRed/mPurple) - #66 by Hobusu (where it affects “in play” rather that “buildings”), Casual: Shax(mRed/mGreen/mRed) vs Hobusu (mGreen/mRed/mPurple) - #64 by Hobusu and Casual: petE vs zhavier (White mirror) - #39 by petE. From having done this exercise though, it seems that the majority of PBF games are unaffected, so it must only affect some users - although I have no idea why this would be.

I’m surprised that no-one else seems to be able to confirm this - unless they haven’t seen the post yet. I’ve not discussed it with anyone until now, but I assumed from seeing the examples above that this is not a problem that’s isolated to me.

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Now that you mention it, I’ve seen this before when I was reading tons of RACE games, though I thought nothing of it.

And look at that! My QA experience comes in handy!

Based on the examples you’ve provided, I’ve found the cause (though I don’t understand why it does what it does):
This happens when the last “In play” thing (unit, building, whatever) has been given not just parenthetical stats, but a further square-bracketed ability note.

I think somehow the closed square bracket, or maybe the whole bracketed word/phrase is causing the problem. Maybe the forum tries to read the bracketed piece as a tag? And since it doesn’t recognize it, it just prints it as text? But trying to read it as a tag somehow messes with the following line break?

Looking back at my games, I don’t see it in any of my posts, but I’m quirky, so I put all notes in parentheses next to the stats (never using square brackets).

Poking @zhavier in case he would otherwise miss this post.

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That probably explains it - because I tend to use square brackets to put even the basic ATK/HP stats in (for no particular reason, I just like the look of them), so this would explain why it affects every post of mine but not most others.

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I’ll ponder how to fix that, but it sounds like it would involve trying to catch when users are using square brackets. Thanks a bunch for finding it.

In the meantime might I suggest not using square brackets?

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Well, @robinz seems to be saying that adding an extra line before the Buildings section fixes things manually. Could inserting another “/n” after the “In Play” section or before the “Buildings” section of the template code take care of it?

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Probably, but it breaks up the “Board State” section. Instead of being one continuous section, it becomes two sections, which might not really bother people, but I prefer it two be one section, then blank lines, then economy.

I don’t know if it has been discussed before, but a technician death with 0 cards in your drawpile triggers a reshuffle before your teched cards enter into it. Is this already accounted for with the “draw 1” button?

In those cases, the “Tech 2 cards” text shouldn’t be the first one that come up in the summary.

It’s accounted for if you draw the cards before you put your tech choices in the tech spots. If you put the tech spots in first, it will assume you’re drawing during your turn, and they will be shuffled in. The spreadsheet doesn’t track draws/reshuffles at all outside of the end of turn Discard/Draw, so you have to note any other draw reshuffles manually.

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Correct, technician draw timeline is either not noted, or manually noted by the player. The sheet handles technician draw like any other draw, but tech choices should not be typed in until after any draws that happened during your opponent’s turn. Technician and gorgon death, for example.

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Thanks for the replies! :smiley:

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How about adding an automatic spoiler to tech, hand and discard in the generate post thing?

And possibly also a (details : thoughts) at the bottom of it?

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I’m against adding spoilers to the hidden fields. IMO, they’re already sufficiently hidden by the details tags, and spoilers just make it take longer to read people’s thoughts for spectators/after the game.

I’m with cstick, this forum software doesn’t show the contents the way the old one did during loading.

I have been meaning to add a thoughts section to the post. Thanks for the reminder.

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After a PBF match, I would still say that I personally would enjoy a spoiler tag for every detail listing. Adding that manually, if you just want to make sure it is still hidden if accidents were to happen if someone presses the details button, is a lot more of a hassle than just pressing with your mousebutton one more time. And apparently quite a few people do add spoiler tags on their own, so the way the spreadsheet works now makes for more buttonpresses in general than if you were to add the spoiler tag to it.

It is still of course up to you if you want to do it, it is still a great product in and of it self, so I am not complaining, more just arguing against cstick’s point, that it would add more work if spoiler tags were added. :slight_smile:

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The beautiful thing about a google doc is you can copy the whole thing and make your own version, with spoiler tags. And when the original gets updated, just copy across and re-edit.
Technology and collaboration are wonderful. You could even put your own version up for people who prefer spoiler tags!

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