Vassal posting to chat what decides what order the posts happen in?

I am having initiative rolls display on the aircraft automatically and to chat. It appears the order of posting in chat is random is there something that determines order?

For questions like this, it would help anyone trying to answer them to see an example of what you’re asking about.

My Red Baron’s War has the Initiative rolls placed on the counter and I use a hot key to fire off the rolls and to report them to chat. It looks like this for example:

So I can’t tell if this is driven by map position of the counter, or if something else drives it.

So I rolled initiative then I picked up 4 planes and move them on the map and it changed the order of reporting:

By picking up Dickson, Hill, Payn and McCudden and moving them it changed the order of reporting.

I believe the messages in the chat log appear in the order that their associated Report Action traits are executed. In your case there is one Report Action for each game piece which listens for the same Global Key Command. So the real question is - how does Vassal determine the order of units to send the GKC to?

I’ve always considered that order to be random, but perhaps some Vassal Mavens can expand on that.

If it is important that those chat messages always appear in order, there are ways to achieve that using Vassal traits, but it would be somewhat inefficient.

Cheers,

Jim Hunter.

The command that triggers the chat message (whether in the trait it self or via Report Action) arrives at the pieces is a seemingly random order. However, as your example illustrates

Before move After move
McCudden
Dickson Dickson (*)
Jennings
Hill Hill (*)
MvR MvR
Bohme Bohme
Wortman Wortman
Walz Walz
Collin Collin
Payn Payn (*)
McCudden (*)
Jennings
Readman ReadMan

(*)Moved

shows you there’s some sort of system to it, One guess could be that those pieces that are closest to the top-left-most corner are seen first. It is not the order in which they were moved that matters, because then Payn and Mccudden would be on top, or similarly. The ordering may also be further complicated by caching.

The upshot is, that you should consider the order to be random or at least unpredictable.

Yours,
Christian