jyoung
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Lately I've been playing mostly campaign games, and particularly in RB/RO you need to track which hexes you've taken control of, and where the perimeter was at the start. If you do it thoroughly the board can get very cluttered, but it's still important to keep the control markers in place. There are existing tools for this, including draggable overlays, but I've never been completely satisfied with their utility.
As my first foray into VASL/VASSAL modification, I've created an extension (hideable-control-markers-1.4.zip attached, unzip to obtain hideable-control-markers-1.4.vmdx) which adds control markers that can be turned on and off at will, by either player without disturbing the view of the other, using the layer functionality built into VASSAL. When they're off, they are completely invisible and non-interacting, and you just play as if they're not there, only turning them on as needed to see where they are and perhaps add a new one.
The extension adds a new suite of counters under Other\Map\Hideable Control, including various control markers as well as perimeter line markers which can have 1-6 hexsides marked (right click, Incr and Decr, or CTRL= and CTRL-) and be selected, cloned, rotated and deleted at will just like normal counters, to make the job of drawing a perimeter line a bit easier than with the draggable overlays. There are two new buttons on the map window, one to turn the control and perimeter markers on/off
, and another to rotate the various layers around 
(which sometimes becomes necessary to select a counter on the bottom, as they are non-stacking and can completely obscure each other due to the way the layers work).
The extension was created with VASSAL 3.5.7 / VASL 6.6.2, but should work with other versions. Also if you open up a .vsav file with the new counters on the map but without the extension loaded, they will just behave like regular counters so shouldn't break anything. I would appreciate any thoughts on whether this is useful (and thanks already to @DougRim for his advice), and if so any improvements I could make (within my small but hopefully growing knowledge of module/extension development).
As my first foray into VASL/VASSAL modification, I've created an extension (hideable-control-markers-1.4.zip attached, unzip to obtain hideable-control-markers-1.4.vmdx) which adds control markers that can be turned on and off at will, by either player without disturbing the view of the other, using the layer functionality built into VASSAL. When they're off, they are completely invisible and non-interacting, and you just play as if they're not there, only turning them on as needed to see where they are and perhaps add a new one.
The extension adds a new suite of counters under Other\Map\Hideable Control, including various control markers as well as perimeter line markers which can have 1-6 hexsides marked (right click, Incr and Decr, or CTRL= and CTRL-) and be selected, cloned, rotated and deleted at will just like normal counters, to make the job of drawing a perimeter line a bit easier than with the draggable overlays. There are two new buttons on the map window, one to turn the control and perimeter markers on/off
, and another to rotate the various layers around (which sometimes becomes necessary to select a counter on the bottom, as they are non-stacking and can completely obscure each other due to the way the layers work).The extension was created with VASSAL 3.5.7 / VASL 6.6.2, but should work with other versions. Also if you open up a .vsav file with the new counters on the map but without the extension loaded, they will just behave like regular counters so shouldn't break anything. I would appreciate any thoughts on whether this is useful (and thanks already to @DougRim for his advice), and if so any improvements I could make (within my small but hopefully growing knowledge of module/extension development).
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