Rindis.com

Crossposted from the SFU blog on BGG.

One thing that has been on the back burner for the last couple years is the proposed version 2.0 Vassal Module for F&E. In addition to just not doing much with F&E lately, I’ve been trying to get some new features done for the module, and they have not been happening.

The first one was reporting the number of ships, and the Ship Equivalents separately (that was easy enough), and adjusting the SEs for crippled ships. Extensive testing has shown that Vassal 3.2 just can’t handle non-integer numbers in the stack viewer in any form. Here’s hoping for 4.0.

The second one has been the major roadblock. I’ve been hoping to get the fleet markers to report the stats of their contents in the stack viewer. I figure there’s two potential routes to this: Since you can see the totals in an inventory window, it seems like it should be possible to just query for the sum of, say, SE in a particular zone/map and use it directly; sadly, this doesn’t seem to be supported. The second method would be to keep track of the numbers in a global variable which gets adjusted as units are moved into/out of the box. Recently, a demo module was done showing exactly this. So far, I have not been able to get it to work in my F&E module, and even if it does work, it could very well bog down performance to keep track of all stats of all the fleets with hundreds of units sending data out.

However, I’m writing this because I do now have a new feature that is working!

I now have a submenu for ships that allows you to flag a ship as ‘captured’ by a particular empire, so that it will report as belonging to that empire in the inventory, and there is a visible marker to show its status on the counter.

How about we just trade back and call it even?

And no, I’m not planning on adjusting AF to account for Hydran hybrid wackiness.

So, this is about where things stand:

New features:
x Choice of regular and large-scale maps. (Hope to figure out an Early Beginnings set up…)
x Stack viewer & inventory counts *ships* and *SEs*
x Flag captured ships to new empire.

Not appearing in this module:
– Crippled SE values (non-integers not possible under Vassal 3.2)
o Display fleet stats on hover over. (still being worked on, but will probably bog down module, even if it works)

Still planned:
* Large Fleet markers. May need a second set for the ‘small’ map.
* Fix ‘crippled’ reporting on single-sided units.

Needs thought:
* How to mark captured planets, etc, on LSM: bigger markers, smaller planet symbols, what?
* Mark the Cordon borders like the sector borders? (And how to keep it from being too busy?)
* Mark EW/AF status for ships that drop AF for EW and vice versa.
* Mark repaired/built ships as capable of free Strat Moves (wipe automatically when moved?).
* Mark hexes for retrograde (some sort of ‘done’ version for battle hexes?)

As always, feedback is appreciated, and as this module is still being pounded into shape, its easier to do something now than later.