Editing a module - foolish beginner questions!

Windows 10, Vassal 3.2.17, Cave Evil mod (1.0)

Hello all, Vassal is a life-saver in these testing times. I’ve finally started trying to learn to make/customise mods. The first one I’m fiddling with is Cave Evil. I’m editing the module and saving it as a separate version. But none of the changes I make to pieces and prototypes seem to take effect when I load the modified module and start a new game. I’m probably missing something obvious so I’ve put this in the general forum in the hope someone will school me!

Example change below…
We are playing by email and decided we want to change the masking behaviour as everyone keeps forgetting to flip their cards for others to see when they play them.
So I edited the card prototypes for each deck: took out the transparent mask image and switched in the normal card back. I also took out the reporting when the card flips, so that we wouldn’t accidentally reveal our cards when we flip them in our hand to see what we’ve drawn. So far so good I thought…

But somehow this doesn’t seem to have been enough to change the card behaviour. They are still masking as before with the transparent mask image I thought I had deleted by changing the prototype for the decks. And the reporting is still there too!
I tried manually deleting the prototype from single cards and then re-adding it, in case it was reverting to the prototype when the cards were built, but that made no difference.

Can anyone figure out what I did wrong? Maybe there is something I need to do, more than just saving the edited module file, to make these changes come into force??

Anything you change in the module is likely not to work until you start a new game (because prototypes and traits are saved in the saved games). Also, if you’re using a “scenario” to start from (which is really just a save file stored inside the module), then that ALSO has to be remade in order to get your changes to take.

Thanks that’s great I deleted all the default setups and that sorted it. So building a module you always have to do the scenarios or setups last I guess?

Yep! That or you keep having to do them over, which is no fun :slight_smile:

Some of, getting tired of this, come up with various strategies to minimize the amount of work involved. Here are some of the strategies:
(1) Your most common set up, do as much as possible with At-Start Stacks so you’ll have “ready to make the save file” by just launching the module.
(2) If you’ve got other scenarios that have a large number of pieces/changes, you can set up Global Key Command sequences that will go through a series of steps to (a) move permanent pieces around and if necessary cards between decks and discards and stuff, (b) delete generic non-permanent pieces/markers, (c) add new general non-permanent pieces/markers where they belong. I do this in For The People and some of the GKC’s for setting up scenarios take almost 2 minutes to run, but setting up the scenario by hand would probably take half an hour each plus I’d probably make mistakes.

So think about ways you could go about that, because remember, once you launch your module you’re almost certain to want to update/improve it later, meaning… new scenario files!