AVL is the only module I know of that has an auto-counter for Victory Points, that one is written with the special Inventory 1.3 classes though so it’s not much help for the non-JAVA literate among us…
I’m finishing up a module for Conflict Games’ Kasserine Pass and here’s what I’d like to do:
There are 9 cities worth different amounts of VP at the end of the game, for the Axis:
Note that the Allies begin in control of these cities and receive no points for owning them at the end of the game. The Allies receive points for holding:
At the moment I’ve got counters with 2 layers for each VP city - one layer has a green background to denote Allied control and the other layer has a grey background for Axis. They are immovable and cannot be deleted by the players, they can only be flipped.
I would like to add the VP values to these counters, and then have a VP button on the top menu that counts up and reports the current VP total.
I admit this is just fluff at this point, and not at all crucial to the module, but little details like this are what make VASSAL special!
I am open to any and all suggestions on how to proceed from here, including scrapping the city counters if another approach is required.
On my to do list is a generalised Victory Point tracker that could be configured for any module. My idea is that Victory Points can be tracked in any game by a combination of 2 different components:
Auto-summing of marker values attached to counters that meet a specified property match string. These would be used to total VP counter as you describe.
Player manipulated counters. These would be used for everything else.
A bit of creativity in design should allow quite a lot of
automated calculation. Any hard bits are taken care of by a Player Controlled entry.
I’ve been on a bit of sabbatical from VASSAL for the last few months, but it might be time to get this one finished off. I had a working prototype a while back, but it was’t very pretty.
Of course, a VP tracker is just begging to be docked into the chat window, so perhaps I should revisit flexible component docking with flexdock…
So the current answer is: “no, that’s not possible, but we’d like it to be soon” ?
Fair enough. Using markers was the track I was heading down, I just ran into a deadend when I started looking for something to count them. It doesn’t seem very difficult for the example I have… I hope to see it added to VASSAL soon!
Although you can not do it with an actual tracker in the toolbar (ala AVL) you can do it with an at start stack that counts for you instead on the actual map temporarily if you have a suitable place to put it, till the toolbar version gets implemented
This is one of those components that would be really handy, and has been on my To-do list for a LONG time, but I just never seem to be able to get to it.
It would be the perfect project for a budding Vassal developer to cut their teeth on . I would be able to give plenty of direction and assistance…
Thoughts on design of such a beastie would also be appreciated. What do you think it should look like? What features should be included? My initial thoughts can be found here:
Various designers take various approaches to provide VP tracking facilities. Each new designer has to reinvent the wheel to provide it for their game. It often requires a lot of fiddly work to make these work correctly.
It is such a basic requirement for many games, that we really need a standard, configurable component (or set of) to track VP’s.
I can think of two different kinds of VP trackers:
Each player keeps an absolute count. These are usually implemented
in games so that each player has one token for each track (there may
be more than one track, e.g., if the VP totals are broken up into 100s,
10s, and 1s tracks). Empires in Arms is like this.
There is a joint, differential VP track. All that matters is the
difference in VP between the players, so there’s only one track, with
each of the two players getting a direction. Many card-driven games
(e.g., Twilight Struggle) are like this.
There are a lot of games which have game effects printed on their VP
tracks, as well, which for those games would make unsuitable a VP tracker
which is just a number and a pair of buttons. (There’s also something to
be said for being able to see the VP situation spatially as a distance
rather than as a value.)
Additionally, there are a lot of VP-track like things which do not track
VPs, but something else. (E.g., Russian Capitulation in Paths of Glory,
US-Axis tension in Advanced Thrid Reich.) I’m thinking that what’s called
for is not a VP tracker, but a generalized tracker which could then be
used for tracking VPs or anything else.
Yep, me too. Another reason I never got around to it. I know what it needs to do, that’s the easy bit. But making it usable, flexible and look good is tough.
What I have in my head is a contraption which acts as an overlay above
an image. There should be a way to define linear sequence of locations
through which a marker may progress by pressing a button.
I had envisaged doing away with a physical track layout and having a scoreboard type widget where the scores/VP’s/trackables would be displayed as numbers, possibly a set of numbers with a total. The numbers are either calculated from properties on the board, or manipulated directly by the players.
I think if you actually want to have a track that things move along, you can do that pretty easily already.
. I would be able to give plenty of direction and assistance…