I have made a pic of the 3 areas in the module that I think controls this. In one pic you can see I just went with “?” as the report name of unknown units that are hidden. This is a block game FYI.
In the next you see my strings that control the message displays
In the next you see the actual reports generated. I moved twice. Once with only one block and the other time with a stack of 3 blocks.
When moved alone I get a “* moves” report. Why does it not say “? moves” in the report?
When moved in a stack of 3 you see that the ? finally kicks in but only for the second and third blocks. The first block always comes up * instead of using the name I chose to put in that field. Is this a bug, or am I not using the string commands correctly. If so can someone write out the correct string for me to try out. Thanks for any help guys.
I’m not sure what’s causing that, but have you tried using a text string for the masked name instead of the question mark? I’m wondering if VASSAL is having trouble with the question mark for some reason (is HTML processing turned on, although I don’t think that should matter?).
I’m curious if you have any Layer traits active on these pieces, and if so, if the Level name portion of any active Layer has been left blank. This could cause pieceName to come back blank, I believe.
Ok maybe. I do have 3 layers defined but I never had to add in the 3rd layer for the game blocks in their prototypes since after the makers and stuff at a lower level got defined everything on map worked fine, so it seemed superfluous to bother putting in the trait lines for layers in all my prototypes for game blocks.
Each level can be given an individual name, which is used to change the name of the piece for reporting purposes during play. The level’s name either replaces the piece’s normal name, or else modifies the piece’s normal name as a prefix or suffix.
So if it’s blank and neither the prefix nor suffix radio button is selected, the blank will clobber pieceName for the purpose of this auto movement reporting.
Interesting but not the “layers” I was refering to. I had meant this “Marker - Layer= block” I had 3 levels defined. map/markers/blocks So even after adding in one test line for one type of block it didnt fix the reporting issue.
What did fix the report issue was not using the ? mark. I tried X and it worked fine after that.
I would rather the ? mark work here since that’s more universally understood to mean unknown.
Perhaps this issue with ? mark in the “name when masked” field not working right can be fixed for the next update. Could someone submit that in if you will.
Yes, the Layer trait is frequently confused with the map-level Game Piece Layers feature. I was referring to the former because I knew it had a tie-in to piece name reporting, whereas nothing about Game Piece Layers would (though it turned out to not be the explanation).
HTML is now set to always. And after testing it still failed to list the first ? in the stack of moved units. Also when moved solo the outcome was the same as I first reported. So HTML turned on does not fix the ? mark having issues. Why this and yet it does not happen to the alternative X or any word alternative? Can this be an easy bug fix?
I don’t know what’s causing the bug, but since you now have HTML processing turned on, you could try using the HTML entity instead: replace “?” with “?” or “?” instead.
It’s confusing the question mark with the Chat Log’s quick colors. Notice how the move reporting is in a different color (pink) from the other messages. The question mark is stripped off for that reason. The unintended consequences of mixing two features. The mask property should probably use some different default name.
Ah someone noticed it was red. Nah that’s not the issue. When I pull a block from the new pieces areas and then move them around it’s all in black. The module’s scenario I was using as a demonstration is out of date because I’m still adding features to the module. Redoing the scenarios will be done last.
Unfortunately, “refresh predefined setups” in the editor still does not fix scenarios when it is run. I can see it went through some upgrades recently, but it still does nothing to fix the saved scenarios. Everything will have to be placed again and then saved so that all new traits and stuff are recognized.
Instead of modifying the masked name of all your blocks, edit the “auto-report movement” messages on your map. Prefix the move messages with the vertical separator character “|”. That should be a lot less effort. The downside is that all the movement messages will be default black text.
