first steps with Vassal engine& placing multiple-size-pi

General Discussion
1

Hi,
I am new to the Vassal engine. Please apology that I sort of directly post my question in the forum. I don’t know where to seach for possible solutions to my probably basic questions. I have two of them. Please help.

1)Is there anyone that could advise me a good introduction and advanced user documentation something like “Vassal engine for Dummies” and “Vassal engines in a Nutsshell” or so?

2)I would be interested in implementing simple board games in Vassal. Right at the moment I have no feeling wether Vassal would be a platform that could suit my needs. I don’t want to spend a lot of time and realize later that what I was looking for is not possible with Vassal, or at least with unreasonable efforts. Here is what I am looking for: Take a sqare grid, say 10x10, width and height of say 50 (actually size doesn’t matter). I want to place rectangular pieces of 100x50 (horizontally and vertically) onto the grid, i.e. each piece would cover two adjacent fields on the grid. (A work around could be to force the player to place two 50x50-pieces next to each other. Works but is not nice.) Depending on the properties of the 100x50-piece I would like the corresponding grid-fields to change their chape, color, value etc. and even prevent the user from placing his piece on certain areas.

Is this feasible or not realistic to implement? If it is doable, could you please give me some short hints how I could do it?

Thank you very much.

Usselen

2

Thus spake “Usselen”:

New documentation is being written right now. In the meantime, I don’t know
where to direct you—the existing docs are outdated.

I think this is possible. One of our module design gurus would be able to
give you some details about how to do it. One thing I can tell you for
sure is that you won’t find another tool which can do this.

–
J.

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3

On Mar 4, 2009, at 5:13 AM, Usselen wrote:

Up to here, this would be relatively easy to do with Vassal.

I think that you can get pieces to cover more than one grid cell by
appropriately setting up the image offsets and using snap-to-grid.
You would want to have the offset setup so that the middle of a grid
cell is in one half of the rectangle. This should also work with
rotation.

Well, this starts getting a lot harder.

I don’t think you could do anything that changes the underlying grid
shape to change without custom programming. Color is likely also not
possible to change. But since you have a piece that you place, why
does the grid need to change color? Why isn’t the color of the piece
itself enough?

Display of color or text that is changeable is fairly easy to do using
layers and text labels.

I don’t think you can prevent users from placing their pieces onto
those grid spaces, though.

The general philosophy of Vassal is to give you the elements for re-
creating a board game interface on a computer. So things like
enforcement of rules, etc. that don’t happen with a board game are
also not going to happen in Vassal.

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4

You could prevent placement via Send back command in a trigger property check of the playerSide property. Depending on combinations the complexity will deepen

You could also use layers (set to underneath piece) to represent your different grid color/shapes overlays that activate when required. This isnt actually changing the grid but instead having the piece visually simulate it for you when its in place

From: Thomas Russ tar@ISI.EDU
To: VASSAL Engine Forums Mailing List messages@forums.vassalengine.org
Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2009 2:12:45 PM
Subject: Re: [General Discussion]first steps with Vassal engine& placing multiple-size-pieces

On Mar 4, 2009, at 5:13 AM, Usselen wrote:

Up to here, this would be relatively easy to do with Vassal.

I think that you can get pieces to cover more than one grid cell by appropriately setting up the image offsets and using snap-to-grid. You would want to have the offset setup so that the middle of a grid cell is in one half of the rectangle. This should also work with rotation.

Well, this starts getting a lot harder.

I don’t think you could do anything that changes the underlying grid shape to change without custom programming. Color is likely also not possible to change. But since you have a piece that you place, why does the grid need to change color? Why isn’t the color of the piece itself enough?

Display of color or text that is changeable is fairly easy to do using layers and text labels.

I don’t think you can prevent users from placing their pieces onto those grid spaces, though.

The general philosophy of Vassal is to give you the elements for re-creating a board game interface on a computer. So things like enforcement of rules, etc. that don’t happen with a board game are also not going to happen in Vassal.

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5

Thank you all for your hints and thougts. :smiley:
I see that Vassal could fit my needs.
I still don’t know enough about Vassal, its capabilities, features, commands etc. in order to exactly understand how your suggestions work. Thank you for basic ideas and “buzz words”. This’ll help.
I know now that I should continue with Vassal. I will have a closer look at it, learn the system and hopefully will be able to implement and understand all of your suggested concepts.