Stacking cards by the bottom

[kerkael]

Hello fellows !

Is there a simple way to stack cards by placing the new ones below the previous ones ?
At the end I only want to see the top line of the most recent card placed vertically higher than the others.

[Benkyo]

To have a piece placed on the bottom of a stack I think you'd have to get hacky. It might work to have a trigger that uses Place Marker to place an identical piece on the bottom of the stack then delete the parent piece.

[jrwatts]

I don't think that will work, because Decks are not standard stacks. I could be wrong, though. The only idea I can think of is to move the entire deck to a hidden deck, move the new card to the original deck, then move the rest of the deck back.

Edit: Now that I read the original post more closely, I see that you didn't specify you wanted the card on the bottom of a deck, so perhaps Benkyo's idea will work after all.

[Benkyo]

Yeah, decks won't work, the point is to have part of the card on the bottom visible. Physically, you would be sliding the new card partially under the other card(s). Unlike the physical act, Vassal would shift all the other cards down (with the appropriate stacking setting).

To add a card to the bottom of a deck you just need a down arrow command.

[jrwatts]

D'oh! I totally forgot there were built-in commands to send cards to the top or bottom of the deck. Good thing I haven't need to do those things yet....

[barbanera]

Hello fellows !

Is there a simple way to stack cards by placing the new ones below the previous ones ?
At the end I only want to see the top line of the most recent card placed vertically higher than the others.

I see two possible solutions:

1) (NOT RECCOMENDED) play with stacking options in the relevant maps and use the down arrow command when you want to programmatically send a card to the stack

or

2) disable stacking and play with Game Piece Layers.

Solution #1 is not reccomended, because a) fiddling with stacking options might solve this issue real fast but make every other stack on the same map look weird/wrong (this could no longer be an issue one day if they made "stacking options" a zone or board level thing instead of being map level) and b) if a user is instructed to click the down arrow himself when placing a card on this stack, that would look ok for him but not for the others, or at least there is a bug in Vassal logging and this is not saved in vlogs. I know this from personal experience, having tried fiddling with stacking settings and/or telling people to use the down arrow in my pbem games. Therefore, I had to develop solution #2.

Solution #2 works, if you can live without stacking for the rest of your counters in the map, but it is very hacky, indeed. I had a similar problem to solve in my modules for Pax Emancipation and Pax Transhumanity, where there are "Splays" of cards that need to be place underneath previous ones with only a small portion at bottom showing. The solution was to disable stacking, define multiple Game Piece Layers (like Splay0, Splay1, Splay2 etc), assign a card the next available Splay level and update a total Splay counter etc. Some heavy logic had to be put in place to automatically readjusts Splay levels when a card is removed from the Splay and/or a user wants to shuffle things around.

Assuming you do need to do something of the sort you might want to look at the Pax Transhumanity module. There is a Splay zone there, on the right of the Main Map, where whenever cards are placed, they automatically move underneath previous ones (and the user will take care of leaving only the bottom part visible, as in the real life game). Then I added commands to use arrow keys to move them up and down the Splay (which adjust the game piece layers accordingly) and even drag along cubes that might be sitting on them. It was very hard work.

[Benkyo]

Oh, the down arrow works for stacks too? Well, that makes things a lot easier, assuming you don't need any other stacking on the map.

[pawnpusher]

This discussion looks pretty applicable to the module on which I am working. It's for an 18xx game which has a stock price chart. Each active company in the game has a token (counter) to mark that company's stock price. Companies take turns operating, and the order of operation is based on position on the chart. Companies operate from high stock price to low stock price. If two or more companies have the same stock price their tokens are stacked, and those companies operate from the top of the stack to the bottom. Almost always a company's stock token is moved to a different space near the end of its operation. Whenever a company's token is moved to a space with one or more other companies' tokens the token new to the space is placed at the bottom of the stack.

From this discussion, it looks like I ought to plan on manual manipulation of the tokens to get them on the bottom of the stack.