Russian Campaign (don’t own it any more but know it.)
D-Day (Avalon Hill)
Firefight SPI
NATO Division commander (great game)
Cityfight
Thin Red Line Yaquinto
Gettysburg (just bought it)
Napoleon’s Art of War, Eylau, Dresden, - (just bought unpunched as yet)
great Battles of Alexander- GMT which I am most excited about! And cant wait to see if I can find a mod. Just bought it.
I just downloaded the rules to Ancients all 3 sections. I would love to learn that game but don’t own it.
I am ready when ever your VETs are ready. I have VENT setup from my gaming online bad ass days.
Plx PM or repsond for a game on any of the above, meanwhile I will try and work out HOW the software actually works ,not intuitive would be my 1st comment but then again it is Java
Would you mind commenting on what you find unintiutive or in need of
improvement? Detailed descriptions of these first impressions are
helpful for us developers.
Well let me say at the outset that I am not a developer…I failed punch card Cobald back in the day. But I do work in the software industry and invest a lot of time on assessing UI and workflow.
I have loaded a mod and shuffled pieces around thats it. I have not seen a play cycle finished.
The challenge I find with VASSAL is not that its hard to install there are lots of instructions for install, lots of instructions for mod creation, it is the getting started instructions are thread bare.
For an app to be usable the help (either standard across all mods or specific per mod) needs to offer a high level approach to how to use the VASSAL tool i.e. on your startup page if you had a 2-4 paragraphs outlining how tool is used then we could jump more quickly into an mod. OR place it under help as the first topic inside VASSAL post mod load.
Bill Bennett’s C&C Ancients provides very clear instructions on how to use the mod, for the key elements; move, combat and admin. I think if I read the C&C rules I could quickly pick up C&C even without owning the game. It was then that it clicked for me about the mechanics of how VASSAL worked.
I think its that much of the joy of VASSAL is in building the mod, not sure I could do that but you guys do a cool job. That gives you a bit of a developer centric approach not a user centric approach. i.e. USING the APP is the 5th topic in getting started. I would promote that to a separate topic on USING the app AFTER INSTALL instructions.
I know this is not a lot of detail for you, in my hast to get started I jumped around the site and forums, and the product. Hopefully after a few games I can offer more comments and mature to making mods for the games I own that are not done yet.
How long does a typical mod take? Has anyone done it for the BIG games Drang Nach Osten etc? is that viable?
Thanks for your reply.
Thanks very much for your comments. I’m looking forward to hearing more
from you as you use VASSAL. We very much need better user documentation,
but so far there hasn’t been much of it forthcoming. This is partly
because the VASSAL developers, and to a lesser extent, module developers,
are not particularly suited to writing that documentation, as they are
far removed from the way that user think. We could use volunteers for
this.
E.g.: Jeff Wise and I created the module for The Longest Day. He did
the map, I did the counters, charts, and setups. The map took him a
few weeks. There are 1500+ unique counters, which I did in a month or
so, if I remember correctly. (This went much faster than if I’d used
scans because I build them programatically using SVG.)
There are some other quite large games for which there are modules,
for example, games from the OCS series like DAKII and Case Blue.
I don’t know how long it took Ben Smith to make these—you’d have
to ask him.
I only know of Drang Nach Osten by reputation. How many pieces does
it have?
1792 counters. 8 maps. Its massive. Rules are complex. Just curious about how fanatical our fellow users might be. I still recall with fondness playing War In Europe for about 6 months at a friends house between about 4 of us. Its almost impossible these days to find 4 gamers in a town let alone have a game setup somewhere for that period. I have the room but I also have 3 small boys
Its a pity that life is so busy that we can’t enjoy- games, long dinners and doing nothing on the weekend. Americans is a bit too fast paced.
I’d be happy to review documentation to help out if someone takes a stab at writing. My grammar blows and I spell like an Englishman.
It’s only slightly larger than The Longest Day. Case Blue has 13
countersheets and 10 maps, so it’s at least as big as Drang Nach Osten.
I don’t know how long that took Ben.
I can’t setup games like this without VASSAL because I have two cats.
Cats are wonderful, but are rather indiscriminate area-affect weapons
which can destroy whole divisions in one swipe.
We could really use help in drafting such documentation in the first
place.
