Hi, not sure if this is the appropriate section to ask or discuss, if not let me know the right one or move the post to where it should be.
I’ve been (very slowly) learning how to edit modules, and in opening them to see if the changes work as I planned, the initial vassal window is always the same (for arkham horror and eldritch horror the only two I’ve been testing so far):
Chat\log maxed out, taking the entire screen, with a thin bar at the very bottom that I can drag up to reveal the main board area…
is there a way to set up vassal so the module starts up with the board visible/dragged up? (something like 70% to 30% of screen height only showing the chat-log area would be ideal)
is there a way to preview an entire ‘box’ area while editing a module/extension so that I don’t have to save, close the editing window and open the module just to see how it is working or test it?
I know it is something quite irrelevant for most uses, its just that while editing and reopening the module 10-15 times within an hour started nagging me a little bit to have to drag the bar up to reveal the board everytime.
I haven’t found an easy fix for this (I did not investigate too much), but if you turn off single window mode in the preferences it can be less frustrating. Unless the multiple window view frustrates you too
I once tried to hack related values in class launch/BasicModule, in order to make the chat always take minimum possible space on startup. Unfortunately, I failed. The best I could do was to set frame height to specific value, and make it configurable in preferences. This however caused other problems, as chat height seems to be counted from the top of the window (or top of the screen, I’m no longer sure) rather than from the bottom of the toolbar. Consequently, while more of the board was visible on startup, the actual visible chat was sometimes broken due to the height of buttons used in the module. It was complicated. Furthermore, I recall it didn’t start the same size for the players synchronizing to me. For some reason, their chat was actually starting bigger than in vanilla Vassal, sometimes taking the entire screen.
So finally I gave up and rolled back those changes from my “fork”.
Anyway, it seems that the visible board height in single window mode always adjusts to chat size, not the other way around, and Vassal always creates the board after the chat. There doesn’t seem to be any easy way to set visible board height directly, there’s only that launch/BasicModule code for chat size. And it seems when somebody synchronizes, their chat height is established in a different way, somehow, for some reason (perhaps it’s some Java defaults, or perhaps it’s somewhere in the code where I did not think to look).
I would like to make the chat always start with exactly one line of text visible, but I don’t think I could hack such changes without breaking things along the way, with my limited coding skills (despite succesfully changing quite a lot, I still barely understand what I’m doing).
There doesn’t seem to be any easy way
to set visible board height directly, there’s only that
launch/BasicModule code for chat size. And it seems when somebody
synchronizes, their chat height is established in a different way,
somehow, for some reason (perhaps it’s some Java defaults, or perhaps
it’s somewhere in the code where I did not think to look).
I’ve devoted three or four whole days to trying to fix this over the
past few years, with no success. You found roughly what I found, which
is that it can’t be done without some major architectural changes.
I concluded that I’d rather not sink more effort into it, and instead
put that effort into VASSAL 4 (and clearing away the things I need to
finish before I can work on VASSAL 4).
