New to the engine and had some questions before I spend a lot of time going down dead end paths -
I want to put Last Night on Earth in Vassel. Is there a way to support the L shaped map pieces? If you’re not familiar with LNoE it uses, typically, 4 L shaped boards that wrap around a square center board to randomize the map. Is this doable in Vassal or would the board pieces be better set up as tokens so they can be positioned and rotated as needed. If tokens is the way to go is there a way to make sure that the board pieces are always in the ‘lowest’ layer so they don’t cover up the player’s tokens and markers.
Is there a module size limit either theoretical or practical? I don’t care about file size issues unless it’s a performance issue. I’ve scanned all the components of LNoE at a higher resolution (cards are 300x700 for example) and I prefer to use the highest resolution I can for visual quality reasons and because there’s a lot of text on them and I’m hitting the mid 40’s and reading glasses are becoming necessary.
Nothing right now but I"m sure there will be more.
Yes. You would make the graphics rectangular with the area outside the “L” as transparent. When you set up the pieces in the game, you would add a Non-Rectangular trait that allows you to define the shape of the piece. The game will then ignore the transparent part of the graphic as being part of the graphic.
You can define any number of different layers for game pieces. Add a Game Piece Layers function to your Map Window, give it a name (like MapLayers) and then define the layers with the lowest most layer at the top of the list like…
Map
Token
Card
You can then define which layer a token piece, for example, would reside in by giving it the Marker Trait
MapLayers = Token
I don’t really know what the limitations would be (perhaps others can answer that) but a lot of very large graphics can be problem for machines without a lot of RAM. You can have your map set up with a Zoom capability in the game and players can zoom the map (and everything on it) to be much larger than they actually are. Well defined print should still be readable at a higher zoom.
Is there a module size limit either theoretical or practical? I don’t
care about file size issues unless it’s a performance issue. I’ve
scanned all the components of LNoE at a higher resolution (cards are
300x700 for example) and I prefer to use the highest resolution
I don’t really know what the limitations would be (perhaps others can
answer that) but a lot of very large graphics can be problem for
machines without a lot of RAM. You can have your map set up with a Zoom
capability in the game and players can zoom the map (and everything on
it) to be much larger than they actually are. Well defined print should
still be readable at a higher zoom.
It depends on how many cards there are in play at once. Each of those
cards will be about 800KB in memory. If you have 100, that’s about 80MB,
which should be fine. If you have 10000, that probalby won’t work on
most systems.
Thanks for the information folks. It’s about 160 cards for the base and first expansion. Using some basic PNG optimization techniques like posterization the total graphics size right now for all cards, map pieces, and game pieces is around 32mb (down from 70mb pre optimization reduced rez which is down from about 600mb pre-touchup) at the lowest resolution I’m willing to accept.
The basic map board size is 3000x3000 to allow room for most of the standard scenarios which is fine for me right now. Eventually it might get longer on one axis or another.
The game supports up to 2-6 players in combinations controlling up to 4 heroes and includes up to 2 zombie masters (green and brown). Still trying to figure out how to arrange for 1 player controlling a variable number of sides.
Thanks for the information folks. It’s about 160 cards for the base and
first expansion. Using some basic PNG optimization techniques like
posterization the total graphics size right now for all cards, map
pieces, and game pieces is around 32mb (down from 70mb pre optimization
reduced rez which is down from about 600mb pre-touchup) at the lowest
resolution I’m willing to accept.
The file sizes for images are irrelevant, only the dimesions matter.
Thanks for the information folks. It’s about 160 cards for the base and
first expansion. Using some basic PNG optimization techniques like
posterization the total graphics size right now for all cards, map
pieces, and game pieces is around 32mb (down from 70mb pre optimization
reduced rez which is down from about 600mb pre-touchup) at the lowest
resolution I’m willing to accept.
The file sizes for images are irrelevant, only the dimesions matter.
Thanks for the information folks. It’s about 160 cards for the base and
first expansion. Using some basic PNG optimization techniques like
posterization the total graphics size right now for all cards, map
pieces, and game pieces is around 32mb (down from 70mb pre optimization
reduced rez which is down from about 600mb pre-touchup) at the lowest
resolution I’m willing to accept.
The file sizes for images are irrelevant, only the dimesions matter.
Makes sense, x/y/z dimensions on an image determines how much ram it consumes after all at run time.
The game runs fine on my w7 x64 tablet, the lowest spec machine I have. A slight lag on zoom in and outs but perfectly acceptable and using my game table it’s just like playing with the physical pieces but no set up or take down. keyourcars.com/koc-digital-gaming-table/
I was able to get the game set up in only a weekend and most of that was dealing with graphics and with learning curve on what various things do in the game engine. It’s nothing extensive, a basic map board for the game board, some additional containers for the decks, scenarios, character sheets and a tabbed pieces tab for the various bits and pieces.
The object oriented functionality of the prototypes makes a huge difference in modifications, glad to see that built in or I’d of been modifying a couple of hundred objects individually as I adjusted things.
Unfortunately it’s not going to be public, the publisher isn’t going to give permission. You can’t do the ‘leave a deck blank’ that some publishers apparently use as DRM for LNoE because they publish master lists of their resources of the texts although no graphics.
This one is about 95% done, just polish left, things like map board backgrounds to jazz up the look of the module, tweaking map board sizes. And possibly color correction on the map boards they’re not uniform for a variety of reasons.
