First (as this is my first post) let’s drop some useless text:
I’ve been messing around with vassal profesionally some time ago (you know, I’m the freak who made some of Dan Versen modules at first), but due to many changes in my life (and the lack of time) I’ve almost drop it dead. Anyway, now I’m returning full of energy to at least finish two developements I’ve on the “to do” box since… 2005!!
I’ve the Thunderbolt Apache Leader module almost finished and I miss a feature in Vassal (I’ve spent two days getting updated to the many new features since when I was playing with this), that is, I made many time ago the Hornet Leader gamebox for Cyberboard and there you can quickly add to pieces an ALT text, that is, an on-mouse-over non conditional label where you can put even BIG chunks of text.
I loved that in Cyberboard as you can quickly add a lot of rules information to the counters without losing time having to go thru the rulebook (again) to find the exact rules… and you can have there too some fixed (not variable) stats…
I know you can do something similar in Vassal but it is a hard twisted not much intuitive work, as you have to create some kind of property in the unit (for example a Marker) and add at least one “mouse over-stack viewer” to show such information… even then the text you can use is very limited as the only item which uses html are labels, and labels are ALLWAYS SHOWN!
So, a new “ALT Text” item, accepting HTML, and presented in a fancy box (similar to that used in Cyberboard) would be a great addition.
This “ALT Text” could be invoked just hovering the mouse or via a key command or menu item (to give it some power), and it even could be great if the HTML even admits some graphics ( tags) will allow it to add terrain icons, small charts, images and much more.
In the current Thunderbolt Apache Leader module you can save A LOT of charts just by doing that, having chunks of information attached to the pieces… for example in the enemy units, having its point cost and the damage chits table (0 1 and 2 squares away damage) is pretty pretty pretty usefull.
In brief and clear words… actually… a big YES
I know that for most things you can actually use a property sheet… but I dont want it to be updatable and I want some (html) control of the text style and so (being able to parse
tags at least)
There you have an example… its an screenshot of the WIP back to 2005 when I abandoned the TAL module (and now I’m on it again)…
The workout of this feature should include a caption text (allowing html), border color, fill color (maybe even transparency), and maybe relative position from the piece and vertical and horizontal alignment (just to fulfill everyone’s spectations), including key and menu commands should be optional as you can already reach something similar with other functions currently done.
The problem right now is that you CANT achieve that without playing with board over stack properties and markers in a not very intuitive fashion, and at the end you will get plain text, not html nor something more formatted.
Having a simple “ALT text” trait you can do a lot of things to help players including small rules for specific pieces… ok, it may not be usefull for “World in flames” but more tactical games like Lock’n’load has plenty of small rules that you allways want to have at hand… at hand could be on-mous-over if you like
Obviously (and sorry for doubleposting) I can go along with the very basic information using “Mouse-Over Stack Viewer” and marker traits with the different values for the piece… results will be like this:
It is ok for Thunderbolt/Apache leader… but I think indeed that this “ALT Caption” html formated feature could be a great thing to have at hand (and not only for novice builders).
Sorry for the triple posting but… after thinking about it a little bit… maybe all this could be done just adding an option to the current “text label” trait to only show the label on mouse over.
Sounds easy, maybe it was difficult to implement but maybe playing with the “mouse-over” event it could be done…
Another cool thing could be to have a detailed list of html tags allowed in the text label trait, and expand such list if needed. For example it accepts table tags but for images I found impossible to correctly put one…
