Did you play it back? Unless something has radically changed, a logfile has always been a starting state that loads initially, a sequence of moves that are played back sequentially with a button in the toolbar, eventually arriving at the end state.
Joel -
Thanks - I didn’t see the playback button. Worked fine…
Never having used the VASSAL logging feature, I didn’t realize it was a playback capability. I was expecting a literal text log of all the material that showed up in the chat window.
I’m guessing a module designer could incorporate some sort of command chain triggered by an at start command to automatically playback the log each time the module is started.
It can be assigned a Hotkey (default Page Down), so I guess you are right. The problem I see is that I think you’d have to do this on a trigger loop, with no (reliable) way to know when to stop. Perhaps it could be done as a “play forward X steps” function, but then you can just keep the key pressed anyway.
“Logging” is what people use to play PBEM – it’s the way they can send each other turns and then each can see what the opponent actually did.
There’s mostly no feasible way to create designer-accessible commands that directly affect the replay of logging … because those would use commands, and commands are what get logged for replay, etc, etc. Vassal is designed to faithfully reproduce the command executed by one player on the board of another – whether through online play or via exchange of logs. There is no way for the module to obtain a perspective “outside of” the logging scheme in order to take control of logging.
The code that packages things up into “commands” and then sends them to other players is actually the same for both online & PBEM/logging believe it or not – it’s just that in the online version the commands are sent immediately over the wire to opponents, whereas in PBEM they are accumulated in a log. But the commands themselves are the same.