My first try at Vassal Module making

So, I have a lot of times on my hands, and have an interest in board game design, so I thought one of the virtual board game suites currently available would be a good skill set to obtain. So before I try making an original property on here, I decided I wanted to try a known board game. So I am attempting to “vassalize” Runebound by Fantasy Flight games, a personal favorite right now of mine.

So far I’ve learned how to place the board down, learned how to make counters, and learned how to make symbolic dice. I’m tackling decks next, which once i understand that i should be able to make a no frills, .1 beta version.

Now I’ve noticed on some games there is an automatic zooming with the wheel. I want all of the cards to be able to be made large to be able to read the text, and then small to be in the playing area. Now I figured worse case, i could make two states for each card, small and large. But with the huge amount of cards in runebound, every extra step to put a card in adds a lot of time to module creation. So is there an easier way to do this, a function inside vassal i cant find yet, or similar? I like vassal, but the documentation is a tad bit frustrating to poke through.

thanks for the help and i look forward to joining the community.

Also, is there a way to start the game with cards already drawn and in place in the item spots. I need one card from a deck that is used through out the game to be placed in 7 spots at the beginning. I also need the quest counters on the board at the beginning ideally. I havent found anything like “Set start State” or anything like that yet, though I’m sure there is one(who would want to set all the pieces up for axis and allies>)

There’s no quick way to add lots of cards/pieces to a module, other than copy/paste. What some people do is to add the images to the module using a Zip program, then hand-edit the buildFile. That works if you’re making simple edits (such as changing the name of an image) but you won’t want to make more complicated change because the format for specifying a piece is pretty obscure.

To start a game with pieces in place, use either a Deck, an At-Start Stack, or a Pre-defined Setup.

r

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After chatting with Joel during his recent visit, I built the prototype for a bulk counter generator. You basically point Vassal at a folder full of images, define some rules about what are counter fronts, backs and layers and then Vassal will load the images and create a set of basic counters for you, each with a ‘Basic Piece’ and a ‘Layer’ Still needs lots of work (look for it in v3.2), but I have used it successfully in a module I am currently building.

B.


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"To start a game with pieces in place, use either a Deck, an At-Start Stack, or a Pre-defined Setup. "

Which of these will allow me to place 7 cards on the board that are randomly chosen from a deck of 100 cards, that will continue to be used throughout the game, and how do I define where those cards should be.

Try not to get too fancy where a simpler implementation will do the job.

These are the initial marketplace cards, yes? Each market place spot can have zero or more face up cards. The market place spots themselves do not need to be decks, that is an overkill. I would just define an Irregular grid on that part of the board and define snap points in the center of each spot.

I would set up 7 ‘Send to Location’ commands on each item card, corresponding to the 7 marketplaces. I would then set up 7 global Key Commands, each one drawing an appropriate marketplace card by sending the appropriate ‘Send to Location’ card to the item deck. Set these up on a toolbar menu to keep them neat.

For the intial startup, set up a multi-action button that issues the 7 individual marketplace draw commands in row. Have one of the players click on this at the start of the game. It is not possible to implement pre-built randomness into a scenario, you need one of the players to initiate it.

Regards,
B.


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Thanks for the tips, Ill look into implementing that in my version .2 . Right now I’m just trying to get all the pieces in I think, take it in small steps. Today I have successfully put in the board, figures for each character, and the counters needed to play. Each player has it’s own play area to put cards.
Now I’m trying to figure out the cards.

The main thing I would like is a right click option to zoom in on an indivdual card, and another one to put it to regular size. Ive found the zoom capability, but as far as i can tell that can only be applied to a map, as opposed to an individual card.

also , how to i implement discard piles? And how well could vassal handle a card that allows you to search through the deck for a certain card, if that deck has 100+cards in it? for now i plan on only scanning cards thats not gonna cause me implementation issues, till i learn more about vassal