Rindis.com

Crossposted from the SFU blog at BGG.

Well, about four months after I initially thought it would be done, the new version of the Vassal Module for F&E is available at starfleetgames.com.

http://www.starfleetgames.com/documents/F&E_1.2.1.zip

Creating the Vassal module has always been an adventure, and this update is no less so than before.

Did you know that the Windows 7 version of Paint doesn’t recognize palette information in older gifs correctly? I sure found out when it did some crazy dithering to some Hydran counters. Of course it looked fine in Paint, it was only after I loaded the graphic somewhere else that the trouble became apparent. Most of the ‘art’ on the counters is done by me twiddling pixels. Paint is brain-dead enough that it’s relatively easy there, but now I’ve learned how to get Photoshop to behave in that mode.

F&E was my first Vassal module, and I’ve poured a lot of time into it over the years. It also turned into a ‘stress test’ for Vassal, as it wasn’t really able to handle that many counters being on the board and active at one time. Thankfully, Vassal 3.1 fixed the resulting load times, and I’ve seen the module go from a curiosity to actually having a decent number of users.