Map makes pieces invisible?

General Discussion
1

Hi all,

Forgive the novice question. I’d like to turn game pieces invisible when they are put into a particular map zone–and make them visible when they leave the zone. (How) can this be done?

(The “real” game has a mapboard and each player has a little screen behind which they hide certain cards. The reason a Hand/Private window doesn’t make sense is that the cards behind the screen are arrayed relative to cards that are not hidden behind the player screens.)

The best interpretation I could come up with was to make a single mapboard, and let players reveal/hide pieces based on where they put them.

Hopefully this makes sense. I just don’t know how to manipulate the Invisible property simply based on where a piece is located on the map.

Many thanks–VASSAL is truly an incredible system…
Gerry

2

I’m surprised none of the pros has tried this(?) Maybe my question was not clear.

Anyway, here is a solution–not sure if it’s optimal; but this is what I came up with after some reading, trial, error:

  1. Main Map: “Key Command to apply to all units…”: CTRL X (for example)
  2. Mapboard: add a Zone (e.g. “Screened”)
  3. Game piece (prototype, what have you)
    –a. Invisible (CTRL I is default key command)
    –b. Trigger Action (“Hide”):
    ----i. Trigger when…: CurrentZone=Screened && InvisibleToOthers=false
    ----ii. Look For CTRL X, Perform CTRL I
    –c. Trigger Action (“Show”):
    ----i. Trigger when…: CurrentZone= && InvisibleToOthers=true
    ----ii. Look For CTRL X, Perform CTRL I

Of course, the Invisible layer should generally be the last one in the stack.

3

I think youll find it works better if it is:

c.i Trigger when…: CurrentZone !=Screened && InvisibleToOthers=true

4

Thanks Tim–I hear that. For my particular purposes, I wanted the pieces to become visible when they were removed from any zone, hence the =(blank).