Struggling to layout multiple components in MapWindow

Module Design
1

First off, I’m a n00b to module design. My simple goal is to mod the 4 player Sword of Rome module to add a fifth player. But the basic board layout has me tearing my hair out. I poured through the VASSAL Reference Manual (a great piece of work by the way) and looked through other module examples - but I’m missing something or somethings…

Basic Hierarchy is (perhaps most easily seen by grabbing the module vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Sword_of_Rome):

MainMap [Map Window]

[Map Boards]                              // Cell scale factor 0.2  Cell width 350  Cell height 125

    Sword of Rome Map [Board]    // a big jpg on the right of the board
    
    Roman Discards [Board]         // laid out top left of the Sword of Rome Map 

    Greek Discards [Board]         // laid out underneath Roman Discards

    <more discards boards>

   <additional boards serving as labels that are laid out *between* the discards and the Sword of Rome Map>

   Rome Discard Deck [Deck]  // Belongs to board Roman Discards
       // X = 139, y = 195, W = 260, H = 380

   Greek Discard Deck [Deck]  // Belongs to board Greek Discards
       // X = 139, y = 195, W = 260, H = 380  -- same as before?!?

For the life of me, I’m wondering how VASSAL takes this info and lays out the map. There is nothing obvious under Select Default Board Setup for [Map Boards}. But maybe the initial values are not shown when editing an existing module?

The pixel offsets suggest that layout is not absolute. The Cell Scale Factor suggests that maybe layout is done under Board Setup… but… the module has a grid that looks like:

±----------±-----------------±-------------------------------------+
| RM-D | Label |
| GR-D | Label |
| etc | Main Map
|Rm cards| Label |
| Election | Label |
±----------±-----------------±-------------------------------------+

Is Select Default Board Setup really the way to tackle this??

Thanks!

matt

2

Unfortunately, the multiple boards setup is really cumbersome to use.

First of all, you need to setup your boards in rows and columns, which are typically not of the same size. To circumvent this problem, I, for one, added to my module “fake” boards 1 pixel wide (of the appropriate height) or 1 pixel high (of the appropriate width).

Secondly (and this is probably the issue you are referring to), even if you are finally get the desired setup going, it won’t stick, in the sense that it works insofar you don’t need to edit/change it again. If you do, you will need to restart from scratch, as the saved setup is not preloaded for you in the multiple board setup editor. I ended up saving somewhere (I wish I remember where…) the succession of true and fake boards I used in the various cells in my module on some piece of paper/text file, for future reference.

Therefore, unless the module you are talking about uses some simple 2x2 or 2x3 multiple board setup with easy to guess board names (of compatible sizes)… you are facing much trial and error and/or trying to contact the module designer for info. The actual board setup might be hidden somewhere in the buildfile, but I am not expert on it.

Feel free to add a feature request like please make multiple board setup editor preload current setup :smiley:

3

Thus spake barbanera:

Feel free to add a feature request like please make multiple board
setup editor preload current setup :smiley:

VASSAL 4 will be able to handle arbitrarily-arranged boards.

–
J.

4

Thanks for the detailed suggestions - this helped me through the mire of problem one. And now it’s easy enough to combat problem two. :smiley:

Roll on VASSAL 4!

matt