"Show grid" that one can turn on/off

It would be nice to be able to turn off and back on at will (=global key command) an hex grid that you have displayed by Vassal (i.e. a rectangular or hex grid with “show grid” on).

But I guess it’s probably easier said than done, because I suspect dealing in real time with patterned background might be the blocking issue?

I can only say that to bypass the issue I though I would take a snapshot of my hex grid on a (temporary) solid color background, edit the image to make the background color transparent - leaving only the grid lines - and then place this image in an at-start-stack at the center of the board, with Does Not Stack never-never-never, a Game Piece Layer to make sure it is bottom most in the pile and a Layer trait set to toggle it on and off. And turning off “show grid” on the board.

Unfortunately, despite it being only 416 KB in size as soon as I do that Vassal (3.4.12, 3.4.13 late snapshot etc) slows down and behaves erratically, starting to throw “Out of Memory / increase heap size” errors.

I suspect it might be related to the actual board background not being solid color but a sea pattern 5000x5000 px and all the transparent hexes are taxing the system or something.

Well, if at all feasible, an hotkey to turn on/off Vassal displaying of a grid would be nice!

I’ve used the approach you outline (turning display of an image off and on). And large transparent images do indeed really bog down Vassal. However splitting it up into multiple images (which all fired on the same command) went a lot better.

Now, I had a lot of dead space where I could just not have an image, which probably helped. But you might want to try making a repeating hexgrid graphic, line up a bunch of those, and see how your performance is. (If you want coordinate numbers too, that a bigger problem, but if the small repeating grid works, you could probably—with a lot of effort—just line up individual numbers to display coordinates.)

Thanks for the hints. On 2nd thought, I guess I could try something even simpler: take a snapshot of the ocean background with the grid on and then alternate it with the no-grid version at the click of a (toolbar) button. There being no need for transparency that should probably work without qualms.

The feature request still stands, though.