I’m Working on a miniatures game. This game has lots of stats for each miniature. i would like to have these stats available to the players in the most accessible way possible.
The way I’ve solved it for now is by using “property sheet” and manually entering each stat as a “label” The problem with this is that its not pretty on the eye, and since no formatting is possible its also misses some parts of the rules (keywords are bold for instance).
Also its a “femaledog” to enter all the information in to the plugin.
What I would prefer would be to have something akin to a HTML for each individual miniature and on “mouse-over” this would get displayed instead of the magnified stack. If that isn’t possible how about a image file stored and shown.
And if that still isn’t possible showing when choosing a command on the right-click menu.
I’ve tried to see if this has been done in any other game (i’ve done a little sampling and not found any that did). But it would be helpful if someone could point me in the right way.
While I’m still learning the Vassal system I do have a couple of suggestions:
Html is supported in property sheets labels, 2 examples shown:
{html}{b}Hit points:{/b} 54 {/html}
{html}{b}{font size =4 color="#CF3030"}RedBoldLargeText{/font}{/b}{/html}
Note: I changed the ‘<’ and ‘>’ characters to ‘{’ and ‘}’ so the forum does not interpret it as html commands
You could make a jpg or png stats image, and associate in a LAYER property (always active) with the miniature that is displayed with a key press. Another keypress (or mouse click, see below) would cycle the layer back to a transparent 1x1 pixel image to hide it. Also, you could have multiple layers to ‘page through’ if there were a lot of stats to display. You could have a global key press that causes all miniatures or those that match certain properties (all miniatures controlled by you, all miniatures that can still attack, etc) to cycle their layers so all display their stat pages simultaneously.
That layer stats image could also be brought up by left clicking on a rectangular area of the miniature defined by a ACTION BUTTON property. Each miniature picture could have that region that one would click edited with a button to indicate where to click.
Layer images can be used in this same way to cycle through weapons icons that the miniature is using, miniature states (hurt, dead, etc) or other aspects.