In particular, I would like to be able to share the work in creation of a different number of Player Decks. These are different Decks in the one Module.
Therefore to be specific, how can I (if at all), have different people work on different decks for the same module at the same time and them merge them into the main ‘branch’? I have tried to copy and paste between two different versions of the same module at the same time without success. Note that the cards are not simple as they have layer, prototype, send to deck etc traits.
Is there anything in the extensions world that could help?
Any ideas welcome.
What you could try is to modify the module on the “buildfile” level. Which means instead of opening the module in Vassal, use a programm to unzip the .vmod file into a folder (e.g. 7zip). There is a file called “buildFile” in this folder which basically is your Vassal module as an XML file. You could add decks, protortypes or cards there by adding the text at the correct position. Then rezip the whole folder again (without compression) and change the ending back to .vmod. If you then load the module with Vassall again.
Maybe it would even work if you put the “buildFile” under some version control (like SVN) so that the version control can take care of the file merging.
Thanks for the idea. I was hoping not to have to go this way, but if I have no other option, this could work I guess. What about the image files? That is, if I want to also merge images (for the cards) how to do this?
I had a quick look at the zipped file format, and discovered that the image files are just in the zip file in a folder alongside the buildfile.
I am guessing that the images could therefore be pre-loaded in one go into the ‘main branch’, then the decks could be developed in parallel on a side branch and them merged to the main branch by using SCM tool or by cut and past from one build file to another.
Are there any tricks when using a cut and paste approach? what about the file encoding? For example, if notepad is used, will it cause issues when the VASSAL engine processes the buildfile at runtime?
Thus spake comdotski:
I had a quick look at the zipped file format, and discovered that the
image files are just in the zip file in a folder alongside the
buildfile.
I am guessing that the images could therefore be pre-loaded in one go
into the ‘main branch’, then the decks could be developed in parallel on
a side branch and them merged to the main branch by using SCM tool or by
cut and past from one build file to another.
Are there any tricks when using a cut and paste approach? what about the
file encoding? For example, if notepad is used, will it cause issues
when the VASSAL engine processes the buildfile at runtime?
File encoding must be UTF-8. You probably can merge buildFiles by
cutting and pasting; I’ve done that before myself and I can’t think of
anything which I know would fail. But keep in mind that V3.2 and earlier
weren’t designed to support editing the buildFile directly, so there are
no guarantees.
–
J.
Thanks - we have decide to work in shifts! The only backdoor we have done is to load the images into the images folder by temporarily altering the file to be .zip.