New Player - Simple Questions

Module Design
1

I’m trying to wrap my head around how to modify modules and struggling to make snese of Vassals structure.

I’m attempting to modify the “Gettysburg: Lee’s Greatest Gamble” module.

What I want to achieve is when you press a simple key or combo (like space bar or ALt D) a disrupted marker is applied to a unit. Currently the Disrupted status does not appear as an option when you right click on a unit (mark as moved, mark as attacked, flip unit ect… all show up but not Disrupted). For some reason when you click Alt-R a select force pool dialog box opens and regardless of what you select in this dialog box the disrupted status marker is applied. Repeating these steps removes the disrupted status. This kinda works but is annoying and clumsy.

In the editor when I navigate to: Add New Units (Game Piece Palatte)>Union Pieces (Panel)>Pieces (Scrollable List)>U72 Gamble (Single Piece)

I try to edit the Gamble game piece to achieve my effect. By double clicking on the piece I can see that it has a trait labelled “Layer - Mark Disrupted”. First question: why doesn’t this option appear when a unit is right clicked? When I double click on this effect to open the properties I see that the hot key for it is ALT-R. So ALT-R is used for two commands. How can I find out what the other command is and change it? If I change the “Mark Disrupted” key command from Alt-R to something else (Space bar for example but have tried other Alt-whatever combos) when I re-launch the module this new command does not work at all and the old ALt-R command remnains active?

Finally, assuming I manage to sort all this out and change it to what I want for this piece, how can apply to all the pieces in the module? Do I have to go in and edit each piece?

Any help in this matter would be most appreciated.

2

A few thoughts from a relatively new module maintainer…

  1. If you want a change to apply to multiple pieces, the best way to do this is to create/edit a prototype that affects all the pieces in question. If you don’t use prototypes, then yes you will need to update each and every piece.

  2. As you have seen, using an unintentional duplicate key command or property is a problem whether it using the same CTR-R for two different commands or having the same attribute inherited twice (e.g., mask defined both in a piece and also in the prototype). You have to look at every entry for the piece AND every prototype it leverages (and then the prototypes they leverage).

My very first fix on the module I’m supporting was similar problem to what you describe, where the “Mask” property was being called twice… It took me some time to track down the cause…

  1. a menu command without an associated key command doesn’t show up… (hint, if I want to use one without a control sequence that will never be called in the module, I use NULL)

  2. Some of Vassals design paradigms take time to learn (e.g., trait ordering)

  3. I suggest you may want to create a duplicate DEBUG piece (just copy and paste the unit in the editor and title it DEBUG) and play around with the traits…

3

If you’re using a module with Predefined Setups, any changes to the main module will not be reflected in the already created setups. I believe there’s a way to refresh the setups, but I don’t use them myself, so I’ll let someone else comment on how to do that.