I want to be able to make a window for filing the cards played over the course of a game. In TK, each faction chooses a card to play for each season of the game, and these choices need to be tracked in terms of what players are allowed to choose later in the game.
If I make an image for a utility window to lay the cards on to describe the turn of play, the image is 250 pixels/card x 3 cards/season x 4 seasons/year x 11 years = 33000 pixels wide, which is fine file size - wise because it is an indexed .png without many details (it is ~ 100 K), but likely java maps this into a much less compressed form when reading into memory, so this is not so good.
Instead, what I would like is a simple rectangular grid with custom labels which are for the most part not numbers or iterated over except as indicies to the array of labels i want to be able to define.
True.
But what about just using a played cards deck or stack and using the
stack viewer to show partially overlapped cards? That would take up a
lot less space. Especially if (I don’t play Totaler Krieg) the 3
cards/season is one each from the three main players.
BTW, what do people playing TK on a table top usually do? Do they lay
the cards out side-by-side or do they just stack them up?
You could always create a new map window with a rectangular grid and
put counters with the labels onto it. I think you can even make the
grid use rectangles rather than squares, and have longer counters for
more room.
on the table top (and how i have currently implemented it in the mod), only the current pick and the pending (next pick) are in particular places other than the player hand and discard pile. (and you are right, it is 3 factions with 1 card choice each per season)
this is okay, but not optimal. the history of cards played must be kept track of somehow, but more importantly, i want to replicate this tool in private player windows so that they can move cards around at will to plan out their strategies over the coming turns as well. currently i do that all on paper printout that i lug about with me. i suppose i could make a bit more space in the player hands so that they could do a basic version of planning like this.
one thing i’ve found with discard piles though, is that there is no way to differentiate nicely between cads that were played, and placed in the discard pile afterwards, and cards that were just discarded without being played, as often occurs as well. perhaps some sort of mask could be plopped onto cards to show their state?
there are probably multiple ways of dealing with this issue, but my favorite would be (if vassal workable) to layout all played and discarded cards in a window which held a grid which nicely displayed date/season, faction, and discards associated with a played card (playing of some cards forces the discard of other cards from your hand.)
hmmm… the counters thing is a great idea. i could easily generate a set of utility counters like that. friggin’ brilliant man! this is almost certainly the solution. perhaps not as beautiful as grid with custom grid-labels, but completely fine…
this is almost certainly the solution. perhaps not as beautiful as grid with custom grid-labels, but completely fine…