v3.3/4 - query Movement Trail/Mark Moved trail interaction

Technical Support & Bugs
1

Users of Commands & Colors Ancients V4.1 have noticed a change in Movement Trails.

What happens is that pieces sometimes lose their ability to leave a movement trail. The movement trail toggle command will reveal the movement trail when this happens. On closer examination, a piece that was moved each turn would alternate in whether or not that movement had a movement trail or not.

We’ve traced the cause down to the way the module does an end turn. Specifically, the module’s End Turn button does a sequence including the following:

  1. Toggle Movement Trail display on Moved counters
  2. Clear the Mark Moved status.
    In my own testing, I simply removed the Movement Trail toggle and this seemed to fix the problem with no ill-effect (Giulio who maintains CCA will issue a proper fix in due course).

However, to the point, this is a change in behaviour from Vassal v3.2.17. So far as I follow the logic, the state of movement trail on or off is now preserved over a Clear Moved, whereas before I guess, a Clear Moved would reset the movement trail to on.

Is this what the dev team expected / intended ?

Mark

2

“Clear Moved” should wipe the current trail but should not change the on/off state of the trail.

Some of the 3.2.17 behavior of movement trails was Intensely Buggy – but of course it was in place for a long time so it doesn’t surprise me that modules were built that assumed that behavior.

One way to fix this in a module is to take advantage of the new key commands added to movement trails in 3.4 (or was it 3.3?) that allow movement trails to be set explicitly to On or Off. Happy to answer any questions to help do that.

Brian