Solaris Skunk Werks is a community-supported tool used to design Battlemechs for use with the Battletech tabletop wargame.

Download the latest release and extract it into the desired directory. You can then launch the various applications by double clicking them or from the command line with java -jar SSW.jar.

This project uses the gradle build system and requires gradle to be installed to be able to compile from source. If you intend to develop the project with an IDE, you'll need one with gradle support. Intellij IDEA and Netbeans 11.x have been tested and both have gradle support out of the box. Netbeans earlier than 11.x should work but you may need to install the gradle plugin.

To build the full suite of applications, run the following gradle task (substitute .\gradlew.bat in all of these commands if you're on Windows):

$ ./gradlew releaseBuild

This will compile all of the applications and dependencies and place them in build/release/SSW_-<version>.

To build a release zip containing all of the applications:

$ ./gradlew zipRelease

This will create a zip file containing all applications in the SSW suite under build/distributions. Simply unzip that file wherever you want to install it.

To build and run SSW directly from the command line during development:

$ ./gradlew ssw:run // Compile and run a dev build of ssw
$ ./gradlew saw:run // Compile and run a dev build of solaris armor werks
$ ./gradlew bfb:run // Compile and run a dev build of battletech-force-balancer

To debug SSW from Intellij IDEA, first run the application with the following command:

$ ./gradlew ssw:run --debug-jvm

SSW will compile and pause until you connect with a debugger. Then in Intellij, click Run->Attach to Process. The SSW process should be the first option that appears--click it and you can continue debugging normally.

Note that all gradle tasks can also be ran directly from the IDE if you aren't comfortable with the command line. In Netbeans 11, the gradle tasks appear in the bottom left portion of the screen. In Intellij, the gradle menu should be in the top right.

SSW's development workflow generally follows the git workflow described here. In summary:

1. Fork this repository and clone your copy locally.
2. If you're implementing a bug fix, checkout the hotfix branch.
3. If you're implementing a new feature, checkout the develop branch.
4. Create a new branch and commit your changes, then submit a pull request. Features should be merged into develop while bug fixes should be merged into hotfix.

Feel free to join our Discord Server to ask questions, report bugs or help with QA testing.