I am working on a module that relies upon hidden movement. All was well until play-testing revealed that the “Center on opponent’s move” feature is always available to turn on for each player and cannot be overridden by editor settings. Additionally, invisible and restricted pieces (both properties set) still doesn’t negate this. The upshot is that there is a bit of a cheat available to follow hidden movement.
I have read that the ability to override this feature was recently removed from the editor. Unfortunately, this undermines hidden movement.
I believe the change you’re referring to is 13276: Center on Moves is now a user preference instead of a module setting.
That’s from 3.3.3-beta1, a bit over a year ago.
We got a lot of complaints about the old behavior from users of modules where the choice made by the module designer was counter to what the users wanted.
I can definitely see the problem if a designer makes a poor choice on this. However, it would seem to be an easy fix to disregard any piece that is invisible for this functionality.
This approach would not change the user’s control of the option, it would simply ignore pieces that are explicitly invisible to him.
We’ve discussed this and I believe we agree with you that the ‘Centre on Opponents’ move functionality should completely ignore units that are not visible to you.
A fix for this issue will be included in version 3.6.0-beta2. The latest 3.6.0-SNAPSHOT build including this fix
is available at Builds of vassalengine/vassal if you would like to test it out.