CT Ship Designer - expiring

[Matt123]

Hi all,

It is with great regret that the CT Ship Designer app will be taken off-line in seven days. It needs a complete overhaul and the messages coming from Heroku (the hosting company) are getting more aggressive about the need for updating, to the point now that if it's not updated in 7 days the hosting will finish. Sadly I can't make that happen.

Overall I'm pretty pleased with the app and the use it has had since early 2015. It was pretty solid from the start with less than a handful of bugs reported in the first six months and very few reported since (up to the point Heroku started getting stroppy).

It may sound a little weird but I essentially went to Uni as a mature student to do a 4 year software engineering degree in order to write this app. Pretty glad I did, if was fun and the degree has helped keep me pretty busy since.

For anyone interested, it was written using Ruby on Rails (v3.1), uses a Postgres DB and was hosted on a free Heroku account until users pretty quickly filled up the free DB .

Next revision I'll use Elixir. Just gotta find the hobby time again!

Cheers
Matt

 

[vegas]

So sad to read this, but thanks so much for an awesome tool. I know i used it a ton. Make that a dton.

 

[whartung]

Curious what the company is complaining about.

 

[tjoneslo]

Me too. Sometimes those are easy to fix, if you have the time and attention for it. Other times they are complaining about things they changed, and may have an easy upgrade path.

 

[Spinward Flow]

As the most recent user of the online application, I found a few bugs with the software that I was able to work around (the fuel purification plant did not automatically resize itself based on total fuel, merely on jump fuel only, which feels like a mistake since the fuel is all in a single common tankage for jump and powerplant, rather than segregated into separate tanks). Things could also get a little wonky with external loads, such as L-Hyd drop tanks, for calculating things such as agility stats and the like. Crew accounting could also wind up being somewhat quirky, where I could add turrets and weapons but no Gunners would automatically appear on the crew roster.

And the pricing for Fuel Scoops never calculated properly for some reason.

The application was a divine intervention as far as being able to test out ideas and do rapid prototyping in an iterative process to as to hone in on the "best" design set of choices for a particular role (including multi-role).

Very sad to hear the application is going to be taken down in a week. It will make research for postings to The Fleet forum a lot more challenging to work up.

Just glad I got to use it the past couple of months before it disappeared.

 

[Matt123]

Largely the "complaints" are around not migrating to new (updated) Heroku hosts which in turn will require updating Ruby given it uses a 6 year old version. Whilst neither is hard, they are not trivial either and will require a time investment of a weekend or three.

For anyone concerned about security issues around not maintaining code (everyone should be concerned about security issues!), the only personal detail collected is an email address to enable password resets to get access to saved designs. There is/was no need to register for casual use.

I may have the Ruby version number wrong, it must be v2.2 or v2.3. Current version is v3.0.2. Change in major number (2 to 3) indicates changes that will break existing code. Change in minor numbers (2.2 to 2.3) indicates compatibility (mostly) with existing code. The third number is used for bug and security updates that do not impact on intended functionality.

If our national lockdown drags on (first one in a Covid free year), my time-poor issues may clear up!

 

[cmcknight]

Hi all,

It is with great regret that the CT Ship Designer app will be taken off-line in seven days. It needs a complete overhaul and the messages coming from Heroku (the hosting company) are getting more aggressive about the need for updating, to the point now that if it's not updated in 7 days the hosting will finish. Sadly I can't make that happen.

Overall I'm pretty pleased with the app and the use it has had since early 2015. It was pretty solid from the start with less than a handful of bugs reported in the first six months and very few reported since (up to the point Heroku started getting stroppy).

It may sound a little weird but I essentially went to Uni as a mature student to do a 4 year software engineering degree in order to write this app. Pretty glad I did, if was fun and the degree has helped keep me pretty busy since.

For anyone interested, it was written using Ruby on Rails (v3.1), uses a Postgres DB and was hosted on a free Heroku account until users pretty quickly filled up the free DB .

Next revision I'll use Elixir. Just gotta find the hobby time again!

Cheers
Matt

Is the source code available anywhere?