I know others have spoken [or asked] on this subject before. But it is indeed an important issue and wargames without FOW are seriously lacking, distorted even. Might this feature appear in Vassal 4 itself? The best is to allow a side owner to see his units but not those of his opponent.
Robbo
The FOW you describe does already exist in V3. Defining sides and using the Mask and Invisible traits allows for your pieces to be obscured or completely hidden from your opponent.
It is up to individual module designers to implement these, it is not a generic Vassal-level function.
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I am not sure it is effective. The problem is that the masking and visibility is controlled manually by the owning player - if both players have invisible units, they cannot know when they are moving within sighting range of the enemy!
A designer, George Hayward, had implemented a fantastic FoW system in modules for Twilight in the East. His implementation AUTOMATICALLY masked and hid units when they were a certain distance away from enemy units - similarly, unhid and unmasked them as enemy units moved closer. The actual trigger distances could be selected in user preferences.
This is the only way to play true fog of war and games like Tannenberg campaign rely on it. I also think it would be an outstanding feature for many other games, particularly naval operational.
George is no longer with us but I do have a copy of this code files. Unfortunately, I am not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination and so need someone with knowledge of the latest version of Vassal and the skills to implement this fantastic feature, which should become a standard.
Would it be possible to obtain a copy of George Haywards code?
I am working with Matt Brown and others on the Second World War at Sea series from Avalanche Press. We have been discussing how to implement a double blind option in the games. On my own behalf, I have considered doing that for the old AH Flat Top game too.
Will it happen? I can’t say, but it would definitely make things easier with inspiration from other peoples work. I don’t own Twilight in the East, but after reading your post, I downloaded the module. It’s easy to find and disassemble George’s code - but in doing so any comments he may have put in the original code are lost. Also a lot of local variables are renamed to var1, var2 etc. This makes it harder to understand what is going on in the code. That’s why I am interested in a copy of the original code.
It’s here:
Thanks a lot…
Thanks, beat me to it.
Agree that GWAS and SWWAS would be brilliant with this feature.