I’m having problems with the official VASSAL module for Fields of Fire (GMT). It’s just so huge, both when it comes to screen-size and memory usage. I mentioned this to them, but predictably they don’t think it’s a big problem.
So I’m thinking if anyone has a script or something that could be used to rescale a module? If not, are there anything problematic about trying to write one? Without looking close at the file format, it seems possible to me that the only thing that would be required would be to rescale all the images and then update all coordinates in the XML spec file.
(Understanding that the result might be a quite ugly and even unreadable module that may require some tweaking…)
This module runs fine for me with my max heap set to 512MB. I recommend
increasing your max heap to 512MB and possibly turning on memory-mapped
images in the preferences. If you don’t have enough RAM to set your max
heap to 512MB, then I recommend getting more RAM for your machine. Unless
your time is worth nothing, you’ll be better off spending a small amount
of money to get more RAM than you will sinking a lot of time into
rescaling the module.
My time is pretty cheap actually, especially if I use that time to make silly little hacks like rescaling VASSAL modules. Manually rescaling things, or removing images, sounds much too boring though. Luckily writing a small script should be trivial unless there is something weird about the XML I don’t know of.
Unfortunately the game does not work well sliced. You need all the cards.
Can’t believe I forgot to check the max heap size though. Will check that. If the module loads I think there is a zoom out button I can then use that might make it playable on a tiny screen (like on this eeepc). Thanks!
OK, the heap size could even be set from within VASSAL now. It was already at mx 512 though, but I changed it to 800. Seems to work fine now actually. Maybe it did, but last time I tried I had too much else running in the background.
I guess there will be no module rescale script now after all. Zoomed out the module seems to maybe be somewhat playable, since there isn’t a lot of info on the counters to read anyway.
Rescaling the FOF images is probably not a good idea. The counters are 75 X
75 raster image pixels and the quality of the text is not optimal at this
size to read (only barely readable).
If you were to rescale these images all the text would become unreadable and
make the counters useless to play with
I know the text is difficult to read, but better than having counters that fill up 1/4th of the screen (which they do now when you hover the mouse over one, even when the board is zoomed out).
After some testing I realised that this module will not work at any scale, since the toolbar uses up more than half of the screen, only leaving a narrow strip of playing surface at the bottom. Need a much much bigger screen to play this module.
Just out of curiousity, what screen resolution are you using?
You can find out by right-clicking on your desktop, selecting Properties, then clicking the Settings tab at the upper right of the window that pops up.
You can edit the module scale the Mouse-over viewer display so that they appear smaller. Combined with using sensible zoom levels should make the module usable.
Manually rescaling things, or removing images, sounds much too boring though. Luckily writing a small script should be trivial unless there is something weird about the XML I don’t know of.