Suggestions welcome…
I’m trying to decide the best way to implement a rotating wheel chart in my Vassal module.
It’s one of those two-piece gizmos – know as whiz wheels or volvelles – where you rotate one wheel and read a result through a diecut window in the top wheel. (Great collection of vintage volvelle images here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/catasterist/sets/72157623862090649/)
I’ve made a top piece image and a bottom piece image, and since Vassal supports transparency in png files, the shape and windows are no problem. The version I’ve been working with uses the two parts of the wheel as two stacked playing pieces, with pivot and rotate traits. I set them up as an At Start Stack on a background map board. And I set the stack vertical/horizontal offsets to 0, so the wheel would look like one gizmo and not be skewed.
Result so far, I can manipulate the separate inner and outer pieces of the wheel chart – it looks very cool, but it feels very fiddly, having to click and double-click so much on the top or bottom to manipulate the inner or outer wheel. You have to unstack the pieces to rotate the top or bottom wheel independently. When you double-click to unstack, It’s not intuitive to tell which piece you’ve got selected, and of course when the pieces are stacked the entire gizmo is locked and doesn’t rotate at all. Bottom line: an unsatisfying clickfest.
Can anyone think of a better way to implement this, using either better/different piece properties, or using some entirely different Vassal capability that is better suited for this purpose?