Counting the pieces - help

Module Design
1

Hello, Vassal nerds!

Its me again :slight_smile: once again i am trying to put my game into Vassal and once again i have a minor problem that technically is just a “forget bout that feature and carry on” type of a problem, but it pisses me off so much that i just NEED to find the answer just to be able to go on.

The thing is, in my game in the begining you make your army out of possible units, each of the units has some price and you have some budget for your army. Obviously, i wanted to make Vassal count it ;D and i failed.

In the Designers Guide there is a similar thing stated - they tell us how you can use the marker (i believe it was there) trait and expalin one of its common uses - counting all the pieces. I thought - wait, if it counts every piece as one and gives the amount of pieces on the board - then I can make it count every piece as SOME NUMBER (its cost) and then it will count my whole army and tell me how much of my budget did I spend.

I did EVERYTHING as in designers guide, except for that one step where I gave different values to the pieces (obviously NOT in the marker Count = 1 trait, which i left as it was, but in that trait that changes the global property or something… idk what im talking about, you know :smiley:). And i gave a different name to my global property (cause wheni realized its better to use the same names as in the guide i had it already on sooo many pieces that i didnt have patience to change it. Lol. so it is called like RTV or sth like that instead of PieceTotal (or sth like that).
AND obviously when i went thru the final step (created the multi action button and filled it with buttons) and saved and opened vassal again and clicked on that button - NOTHING HAPPENED! Totally. I tried many timesw changing different values etc and nothing happened too.

By the way - in the guide there has to be a mistake (yet i tried both ways - as guide says and as I think it should say xd if there is a mistake that i think there is). It says that multi action button should have Zero total (logic for me), Piece Total and Count Report (this one is also logic)…
But why Piece Total? First - there aint something like that (they tell us to make PieceTotal, not Piece Total) but whats more interesting - PieceTotal is a property, not a button :smiley: so why would we add it to the multibutton? Aint it supposed to be “Total Pieces” instead of that (there IS a button like that created in that guide).

I hope someone will help me and tell me (speaking slowly like to a mentally challenged person) how can i do it. :slight_smile:
chears n thanks 4 help.

2

Yes, you are right about the typo on pg 48, lines 5 & 7… those need to match up.

I understand you changed the PieceTotal global property to RTV, leaving everything else the same, and you say you’re not seeing any message reported. This means that the Count Report action button has not been integrated into your multi-action button, as you should be seeing (at the very least) the words: “Total Number of Pieces on Map” reported in the message window every time you click your multi-action button.

So… first, check that Count Report action button. It should say (w/o quotes): “Count Report” in button text, it should have “display message” checked, and it should have “Total Number of Pieces on Map: $RTV$.” written in Report Format.

Now save and open your game. You should not see a “Count Report” button on your toolbar - if you do, then you did not properly enter “Count Report” (w/o quotes) into your multi-action button - so stop here and fix that.

When you no longer see a “Count Report” button on the toolbar, click your multi-action button and you should see “Total Number of Pieces on Map: [x number].” reported in the message window. Is the figure it’s giving you correct?

I’ll be happy to follow-up from here.

3

Thanks :smiley: now it works absolutely perfect and im REALLY happy it does. It will be now much easier to create a starting army in my game (if basic maths is something too dificult for someone - as it is for me, i have no problem with maths… if a computer does all the arythmetic stuff for me xD). And it can even allow making a mode (shortified version of the game) where you win when oponents army reaches some (low) value (instead of - normal in this game - “kill em all” victory condition)

IM REALLY HAPPY, THANKS <3 i will ask more frequently about my problems, cause people here can answer questions really well and kindly ;)