At-Start Stack - any easy way to create?

I’ve got a module I’m working on that has a ton of pieces in the palette. Is there any easy way to create At-Start Stacks, given an existing (large) Game Piece Palette? The best I can come up with is copying units one-by-one from the palette to the stack, which is rather painful as one has to scroll back and forth for each piece.

If I could have two views of the module editor open in separate windows, it would help a LOT with that (and many other things - it would be generally handy to be able to see one part of the object list while working on another), but I don’t know if that’s currently possible. It’s the repeated scrolling that really gets me here.

Thanks!

Unfortunately, cut and paste is not very sophisticated in the editor.
However, one alternative you might consider instead of at-start stacks is
pre-defined setups. Start a game, drag whatever you want from the palate
onto the board, save the game, and put the saved game into the module.

Strikes me that this might be easier.

  • M.

On 4 October 2010 21:22, demoss demoss@stanfordalumni.org wrote:

I’ve got a module I’m working on that has a ton of pieces in the
palette. Is there any easy way to create At-Start Stacks, given an
existing (large) Game Piece Palette? The best I can come up with is
copying units one-by-one from the palette to the stack, which is rather
painful as one has to scroll back and forth for each piece.
If I could have two views of the module editor open in separate windows,
it would help a LOT with that (and many other things - it would be
generally handy to be able to see one part of the object list while
working on another), but I don’t know if that’s currently possible. It’s
the repeated scrolling that really gets me here.

Thanks!


Unfortunately, cut and paste is not very sophisticated in the editor.� However, one alternative you might consider instead of at-start stacks is pre-defined setups.� Start a game, drag whatever you want from the palate onto the board, save the game, and put the saved game into the module.


Strikes me that this might be easier.

- M.

On 4 October 2010 21:22, demoss <demoss@stanfordalumni.org> wrote:

I've got a module I'm working on that has a ton of pieces in the
palette. �Is there any easy way to create At-Start Stacks, given an
existing (large) Game Piece Palette? �The best I can come up with is
copying units one-by-one from the palette to the stack, which is rather
painful as one has to scroll back and forth for each piece. �
If I could have two views of the module editor open in separate windows,
it would help a LOT with that (and many other things - it would be
generally handy to be able to see one part of the object list while
working on another), but I don't know if that's currently possible. It's the repeated scrolling that really gets me here.

Thanks!

_______________________________________________

On 5/10/2010 at 9:43 AM Michael Kiefte wrote:
Unfortunately, cut and paste is not very sophisticated in the editor.
However, one alternative you might consider instead of at-start stacks is
pre-defined setups. Start a game, drag whatever you want from the palate
onto the board, save the game, and put the saved game into the module.

Pre-defined setups is definitely the way to go. You do not want to be defining the same counter in more than place in the module.

Brent.

I’m probably going to edit a copy of the buildfile for Stalingrad to make a variant, but I noticed that adding a few pieces
using the module editor required extra steps for the at-start stack. Looking at the changes to the buildfile, I noticed that the new
pieces, like the originals, all appeared twice.

While I don’t like the idea of having
every piece appear twice, I have the impression that using Predefined Setups will force me to drag every piece out of a Game
Piece Palette. I’ve tried doing that just a little and don’t think I can do it accurately or quickly. I’m not understanding the GUI
very well at all. Among other things, there seems to be a very narrow extra scrollbar with a dashed appearance
that I need to use to scroll through the pieces, but it isn’t always present and it is really hard to hit accurately and drag.
All this is more likely user error than bugs or design error, but I still may have to avoid the issue.

Anyway, advice about editing buildfiles would be nice. In particular, I don’t have any idea how to check that I’ve accomplished a valid edit. So far I’ve noticed that all the pieces have a unique ID (or two of them
if they appear twice) and that there is a “next piece” value that should be set to the last ID+1. I’m likely to use a script
to edit a copy of the buildfile. I’m sure I’ll be looking at diffs between the old and new buildfiles.

Anyone is welcome to try to talk me into doing things differently. Even if I’m not persuaded, you’ll focus my attention on the
hazards of my methods and probably help me a lot.

BTW, there hadn’t been any forum posts for a while when I was writing this. I hope everything is OK.

Thanks very much
Stewart
(scs)