I would like to see a toggle added to the “Mask” dialogue that allows designers to choose what state the mask is in when the piece/card is created. There are some pieces in the modules I design whose starting state should be - “visible to the owner, but masked to opponents”, i.e., face down for all but the owner. Right now, you basically have to manually change the mask state of those pieces and save a game.
Right now, I have pieces that must be manually “hidden” before placing on the main map, and these pieces are only revealed when detected by an opponent recon asset. So, NONE of the pieces are seen by the opponent(s) until the player reveals or “flips” the piece. So, the piece’s natural beginning state will ALWAYS be “hidden”, but the unit information is always visible to the owning player
If I’m not clear about this, I can certainly expand on it. Or, if I’m missing something that is a simple way to do this, please enlighten me!
I agree I have had problems w/ not being able to set the initial mask state explicitly.
One thing you can experiment with, that I think Tim M taught me–
Make a secret / invisible / empty / offmap deck, one per player, on a “private map” belonging that player. Set it, in your case, to “always face down”.
When setting up your games, use a sequence triggered by a Global Key Command to move your pieces you want masked (and to be clear, either pieces or cards can be sent to a “deck”) to the secret-hider-deck - thus hiding them and making the mask “owned” by the right player - and then automatically move the now-properly-masked piece/counter/card/whatever to where you actually want it for game start.
So then you still have to do this step when setting up a scenario, but you can set it up to all be done by a single keystroke (might take a bit to process).
I mean, when you add the “mask” property, and create the masked view, you have two states for the piece. In my case, I call it “hidden”, where the piece back is shown to opposing players, and a “hidden” .png file is overlayed the “front” of the piece to the owning player.
Essentially, I want that hidden property to be the DEFAULT state of the piece, and the player then must basically “unmask” the piece when it’s to be revealed to the opposing player.
I understand there are a number of ways to do it, but I’m requesting that we are able to select the “masked” state as the default state of the piece, that way the piece “back” is always the default for the opposing player(s), and the natural front of the piece is still visible to the owning player, and with the “hidden” mask, as the default.