Hi! I believe that form is actually broken in the current build; it’ll be fixed in the update scheduled for next week.
Once it is fixed, there’s an “export” button in the COMP/CON pilot menu, which will bring up a panel that says “copy pilot data to clipboard”. Press that, then paste that text into that textbox in Lancer Tactics.
Downtimes are essentially text-based scenes (though there can be “dioramas” with all your mechs and pilots in a static scene as a background) where you can go through conversations, narrative sections, and do repairs and build changes.
We don’t currently have dice rolls/pilot triggers because most of their juice in tabletop comes from human flexibility and ability to make them interesting — straight percentage-based choices with shallow mechanical juice to back them up isn’t a good addition to a visual novel engine, according to my game designer eyes. Especially with such a ready save/load system available.
But there is support for player choices ticking clocks, and triggering various Twine-y narrative tracks based on persistent module state. So narrative choices and stuff happening on the combat layer can be checked and reacted to by the module creator in whatever way they’d like. I’d like to also add easy support for discrete mechanical Reserves to gain and expend, but haven’t had the opportunity yet.
NPC capability is what you already see in the combat editor, which is to say there’s limited control the mapmaker has to tell them what to do (“stay in this zone”) but the AI controlling all the different abilities is too unwieldy to give predictable personalities beyond those defined by the gear they hold.
Oh yikes! That’s very strange… I’m trying to think what might be going wrong. It sounds like it might not be able to save characters in the first place? If that’s what’s happening, it should show some errors in the logs after it happens. Could you send a copy of you logs to me?
