Folks, let it never be said that I don't know when my own work is crap. It happens. Something had been bugging me about the repaint/remold system ever since I put it in in a frenzy of late-night zeal some months ago, and I finally figured out what: it sucked.
I won't go into detail, but the good news is that I've replaced it with what I feel is the correct solution. In a nutshell, the mold information has been worked into the alternate form tree, such that when you browse your way to a leaf node, you can now browse even further down into molds and even sub-versions of molds. Here's an example:
http://www.shmax.com/Database/378?tab=1&browse=1See what's going on, there? Here you see several familiar G1 Decepticon jets that we all know are cousins--you can see now that Skywarp and Starscream were made from the exact same mold, and also that Ramjet was made from a retooling of that mold, and Thrust from another, and so on.
Get the idea? No? Well, I'm still fine-tuning things, but I hope you'll agree that the new system is an improvement over the old one. Most of the work involved coming up with a widget for the figure form that wouldn't cause seizures in lower primates, and I'm not quite there yet, but if any of you feel like doing a little data entry I'd welcome any feedback you have, of course.
- shmax
