I found the module for a game I played years ago. In the game some of the counters were dummies and were indicated by a counter randomly placed upside down underneath the unit counter that said “dummy”. When the unit was sighted, that counter was turned over to reveal the status.
I can,t see a way to implement that with Vassal, It’s an old SPI game, Wolfpack.
Add a “mask” Trait to all the units.
You may have to use a paint program to make your back side. Just ensure its the same size as the front. 
Thanks. It is an old SPI game that I sold years ago and I’d like to play it on Vassal.
I don’t seem to be able to find that in the module editor, this is what I see and I would be
happy to find where to go from here.
I grabbed the module from this site. Opened it in the editor. If yoou look in the Game Piece Palette and the ‘Convoy’ Piece (Blue in the picture). You see that the Convoy piece has a Prototype of ‘Convoy’ where all the details are at. (Green in Picture). What you probably want to do is add the “Mask” Trait to the prototype. Location IS IMPORTANT. Traits are implemented from bottom to top. So anything ABOVE the Mask trait will be hidden by the Mask.
You will probably want to play around with specific test & images.
Here is a link to an “Invasion America” module I did with the Counters masked from everyone until “tested” in combat. Look at what I did, in the editor.
Link: InvasionAmerica_3.VMOD - Google Drive
Note that using mask: All the units will be called Untested until unmasked. The force Pools are actually ‘Decks’ so a player pulls out random strength units, but doesn’t know what value until unmasked. That sounds like something you want to do with wolfpack.
So, I think what I need to do is to make an image of a sub outline to put on the back of the sub counters to indicate it has not been sighted. However there doesn’t seem to be a “prototype-sub”. Is it necessary to create one?
Thanks,
Rick
I already deleted the module. but looking at the picture above.
There are 2 possibilities in prototypes
U-boat
Wolfpack
Go to the ‘Game Piece Palette’ double click one of the subs. I bet one of the 2 above prototypes is referenced.
Yes you will need an Image for your “mask”
What I would do:
place a copy on the module in a separate folder
Us a program (I use 7-zip) to “unzip” the module. (a .vmod file is just a specialized zip file).
there will be a ‘Image’ folder with all the graphics.
I would grab the front side of whatever you want to mask. this guarantees you have the correct size image.
Use whatever paint program you like, it doesn’t have to be fancy. I use GIMP (freeware)
Then the easiest thing to do “paint” the image with the background color and Put a question-mark in the middle.
Save the image as with a unique name, use that filename in th emask command.
Thanks, that will keep me busy for a while.
I put the module in a separate folder
Unzipped the module
Opened the image folder
Found an image called “sighted small lighter”
edited it to add a question mark
saved it as “not sighted small lighter”
Now I have a folder with the images, including the one I made.
I know how to zip the file, but I can’t find how to add it to the Vassal module. Do I just zip it and save as .vmod?
See if this helps visualize things. In order to come up with a valid module file, you will need to multi-select buildfile.xml and the images directory containing your newly-created image file. If there are predefined setup files (ending in .vsav) you’d like to preserve, you’d also want to include those in your multi-selection before zipping things up.
I discovered that the module designer had already done that. Thanks for the replies, it was educational.