The NATO symbol generator is a great tool, but it could be more useful with just a few additions. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APP-6a has a decent overview of the scheme.
Adding HQ, paratrooper, motorized and airmobile modifiers along with MP, rocket, and mortar symbols would be good. Maybe down the road adding a third overlay option could handle some rare specialized units.
I can’t remember if the amphibious modifier is currently included, but if not, that’s another important one.
All good suggestions, I have opened up an RFE for you.
I always meant to get round to adding more of the symbols (there are commented out references to the missing ones in the code), but have never got around to it. The way the symbols are generated is somewhat painful, especially anything with curves. It’s time-consuming to get it right.
Do you have any programming skills at all? It is a relatively easy job to add the additional symbols in, using Java 2D graphics. I would be happy to assist, but don’t have the time to put into generating the symbols at the moment.
Regards,
Brent.
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I’ve actually been messing about with the Java 2D functions recently. My skills are decidedly basic, but I think I’ll take a look and see if I can do anything.
Email me directly on b.easton at exemail.com.au and I will send you some stuff to look at. It really won’t be that hard. If you can code up the drawing, I will fit it all together.
Cheers,
Brent.
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Thus spake “Brent Easton”:
I would suggest creating a complete NATO symbol set in SVG. (Actually,
there may already be one.) If we had that, it might give us the motivation
to add SVG support to GamePieceImages.
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J.
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Thus spake “bartleby”:
After poking around a bit I would say that definitely the way to go with this
is to produce a set of SVG symbols. The standards documents are available
online as PDFs, and you could use potrace from inside Inkscape to get get
the symbols.
The American version of APP-6A, MIL-STD-2525A, is here:
assist.daps.dla.mil/quicksearch/ … ber=114934
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J.
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Thus spake “Brent Easton”:
Please, PLEASE if you’re going to put effort into this, don’t hardcode it
all as Java2D. Creating an SVG symbol set will be less work and have utility
beyond just creating tokens with GamePieceImages.
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J.
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I agree it would be nice to redo the lot as SVG, but it is the difference between a few hours coding to add the 3 or 4 missing symbols, or several weeks work to make all the symbols and recode all of the GamePieceImage stuff to use them.
It’s up to Chris as I have no plans to spend time on this in the near future.
Chris, if you are interested in going down the SVG route, I can help out with the restructuring.
Cheers,
Brent.
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Thus spake “Brent Easton”:
I’d be happy to provide guidance on how to proceed with creating the SVG.
I’d also contribute the WWII German symbol set I created for The Longest
Day, so that we wouldn’t be recoding GamePieceImages just for the NATO
symbols.
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J.
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Yes, that would be great. I had always planned to add the German symbols as an alternate set, but it was too hard via Java 2D.
B.
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Thus spake “Brent Easton”:
All of the ones you’d be likely to want for any combat function at battalion
or battery level or higher I’ve done already, and I have a fascimilie of the
OKH document which defines all of the symbols, so anything official which I
haven’t made yet could be made easily.
If you needed something weird, say an armored, flamethrower-equipped marching
band army group, then you’d need to add that, but all of the symbols are
in the document for it. 
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J.
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I’ve already done a few in Java2D, but SVG does sound like it is overall the better way to go. I have even less experience with vector graphics, but I’m willing to see what I can do.
Why not just use NATO fonts? They can be accommodated in SVG as well.
2009/1/9 bartleby <messages@forums.vassalengine.org (messages@forums.vassalengine.org)>
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Thus spake “Michael Kiefte”:
A sufficient reason would be that his license is LGPL-incompatible. He says:
"These fonts and sample files may be distributed by any means, provided that the following limitations are obeyed:
My understanding is that as distributors of libraries we license under the
LGPL, we’re not permitted to impose an additional conditions like that.
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J.
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Good point. Thanks for pointing that out.
2009/1/9 Joel Uckelman <uckelman@nomic.net (uckelman@nomic.net)>
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Thus spake “Michael Kiefte”:
I suppose we could always ask him if he’d be willing to LGPL (or GPL) them
for us. I also have some worries about quality, though—why does there seem
to be no antialiasing in the example pics?
(Side note: We presently rely on libraries which are licensed Apache 2.0
and LGPL, and possibly one thing which is public domain. Apache 2.0 is
explicitly GPLv3-compatible, so if we were to change to GPLv3, we’d not
only have a whole world of GPL’d code we could take advantagte of, but
we’d have less license tension, since we could as licensees license
everything we use ourselves as GPLv3. There’s some particular GPL’d code
from which it would be very nice to be able to copy—the JDK itself is
GPL’d, and contains a lot of private and package-private classes and
methods which it would sometimes be nice to have available directly.)
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J.
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If they’re TTF, then it’s the JVM’s responsibility to antialias them properly. The nice thing about fonts is that you could do something about hinting at different scales. I don’t know if he’s done a good job at hinting his fonts or not. However, the font itself is trivial and anyone can . It’s not like there are cute serifs all over the place – this has to be one of the simplest fonts to implement.
About the hinting… If you were really clever, you could scale fonts separately from rasters such that you had good pixel alignment at any scale.
Of course that makes no difference whatsoever right now; the unit designer just spits out a PNG file. What’s more, I don’t think any of this will make any difference at all with JOGL, so it may not even be worth thinking about too much.
I can’t address the licensing issue below. I don’t know what the difference between GLPv3 and v2 is. Is there really a whole world of code out that that is GPL3 and currently unavailable to us?
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Thus spake “Michael Kiefte”:
That’s basically how SVG works for fonts.
Which is something I’d like to change. I think it should produce SVG instead.
That would result in better image quality at all sizes and orientations.
Eh? Why not?
It’s not a differnence between GPLv2 and GPLv3 that keeps us from using GPL’d
code; rather it’s that we’re LGPL and code reuse flows from LGPL to GPL but
not vice versa. (Code reuse is a directed graph, and the GPL is a sink, or
nearly so.)
The issue with GPL versions is that Apache 2.0 is incompatible with GPLv2,
We depend on some Apache 2.0 licensed libs, so we couldn’t ever use GPLv2
ourselves. In contrast, the GPLv3 is compatible with both Apache 2.0 and
GPLv2, so using GPLv3 would mean that there was almost no worthwhile code
out there that we couldn’t use.
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J.
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Posting from a Palm T|X sucks, by the way.
I like the idea of using fonts for NATO symbols. For the symbols that are in use currently, the font would be easy to reproduce (it’s mostly boxes and lines – adding hints for that is pretty straightforward). On the upside, it would theoretically be possible to make importing new symbols very easy. In fact, I would very much like a feature whereby users can save fonts to the module archive. The downside is that not a lot of people are familiar with making fonts (although it is relatively easy – FontForge for example).
Can we add that as an RFE?
2009/1/9 <mkiefte@gmail.com (mkiefte@gmail.com)>
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Chris,
I suggest you proceed with your original plan and add the few missing symbols you mentioned using Java2D. That’s a wrap then and can be put to bed.
If you want to go further, then as a new project, I would look at adding a new Symbol type that uses the SVG symbols and/or creating SVG. This will be a major undertaking.
The reason for this is to guarantee that what the designer designs appears EXACTLY on ALL target systems. Can you guarantee that an SVG image will rasterize identically on all target systems. Testing of Game Piece Images showed that the same fonts (eg. plain Arial) render slightly differently on different systems. A designer spends hours getting the layouts pixel perfect on their Windows system and they look like crap on a linux system.
B.
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