Well, NO. I am pretty confident that I never created a Game Palette named “required so next game piece palette will open in its own window”. I might be eccentric, but not that much!
Those pieces were selected from the 2nd Game Piece Palette in the module, the one called “Auxiliary Pieces”, which is set to be “hidden” (while the first one - “Game Pieces” - is not).
The thing is that up and including 3.3.3 beta1 those pieces are correctly “place marked” in the VP track window, whereas if I open the same module with 3.4.0 beta1 those pieces give those error messages and are NOT placed in the VP track window.
Well, I just edited the buildfile to replace all occurrences of “required so next game piece palette will open in its own window” with “Auxiliary Pieces” and the error messages are gone and the functionality seems 100% back.
As you said, those strange “required… etc etc” strings are there even in buildfiles of previous versions (pre 3.4.0 and pre 3.3.3), and I don’t know what caused those to appear - perhaps some careless buildfile hacking.
It’s amazing the module would work with pre 3.4.0 at all! Perhaps failing to find that non existing game piece palette, the engine would revert to hunt down those pieces elsewhere…? Whereas 3.4.0 is now stricter and will just refuse to search any further…? Weird!
I was just going to say that text is sprinkled through your old buildfiles.
That text certainly doesn’t appear in the Vassal source anywhere.
Is there a version that DOES have these strings in the buildfile, but seems to work on either 3.3.2 or 3.2.17? I would like to investigate how they worked before. Either the error messages where suppressed and they didn’t work, but you didn’t notice (unlikely from your description) or, as you say, something has changed in how the Place Marker paths is being handled.
This particular error occurs when you have used the ‘Select’ button to select a GamePiece palette PieceSlot to use as the Place Marker, but then delete or rename the GamePiece palette.
All versions worked (somehow!) on 3.3.2 an 3.2.17 and even 3.3.3 beta1. You can try with 0.993 (even as is, i.e. saved under 3.4.0 beta1) or earlier, say back to 0.8 just to be safe.
To check that it “works”, after starting a new game, you need to open the VP track window (laurel icon) and see that all lines are properly filled.
By proper I mean as in the screenshot I uploaded on the same google drive folder, named “VP track at start (3.3.3 beta1).png”. Compare that with “VP track at start (3.4.0 beta1).png”, where some lines (labeled “claims”, “factory C” etc) are missing 1’s and 0’s, up and down “buttons” etc. These screenshots were produced using 0.993 (which has the weird strings in the buildfile) with 3.3.3 beta1 and 3.4.0 beta1, respectively.
