I am trying to make what I believe is a simple edit to the 7 Ages module. However, I have never messed around with Vassal besides playing games with it. So I am asking you all for help.
This module contains 15 different colored sets of player pieces / counters. I want to add a 16th set in a new color. I created new folders for the counter types by copying and pasting existing counter folders. What I cannot figure out is how to access the existing .gif files so that I can edit them (i.e. change the color). Is that even possible?
Secondarily, these sets of player counters all reside on a map board. That map board image also needs to modified to make room for the 16th color set.
a Vassal module (the *,VMOD file) is basically a zipped archive, so any standard unzipping program should be able to extract all the files from it.
I myself use Total Commander and its ability to view a ZIP archive as a regular folder, where you can copy in and out of it.
So what you need is to open the VMOD file in WinZip or WinRar or something else and copy the necessary files to a directory of your choice, then edit them and lastly to re-zip them back.
Use 7zip to open the module as an archive–it’s free and open source, not adware or nagware. Extract the images folder to get all the digital art assets. I don’t know how extensive the edits are that you need to make to the map, but any graphics editor should be up to the task. I use GIMP and/or InkScape depending on what needs to be done.
Well, 7zip isn’t actively developed for MacOS anymore. Looks like there are some ancient builds of it, but I can’t vouch for them. Your solution here will be to either make copies of modules and manually rename the files to decompress them, or use some other utility.
GIMP and Inkscape both have native MacOS versions these days (you used to have to run both of them within XQuartz, a version of the X11 windowing system).
Well, 7zip isn’t actively developed for MacOS anymore. Looks like there
are some ancient builds of it, but I can’t vouch for them. Your solution
here will be to either make copies of modules and manually rename the
files to decompress them, or use some other utility.
Surely zip and unzip exist on OS X, right? They’re part of FreeBSD,
e.g., but if they’re missing it wouldn’t be the first time that Apple
removed a BSD tool I expected to be present…
Right, you can compress/decompress ZIP archives in MacOS–but people not fully understanding how VASSAL expects the contents of a valid archive to be structured seem to get tripped up frequently. Because MacOS will automagically decompress a ZIP’s contents into a new folder it creates on the fly, when an unsuspecting user adds, removes, or modifies files (say, in the images/ folder) and then tries to compress everything back up, they often do the compression at the wrong level (i.e., the new folder MacOS created becomes the root of the archive, rather than the folder’s contents). That leads to “not a valid module” messages and baffled users.