HiP units and Sniper counter funkiness

Vinnie

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Gentlemen, a slihtly funky thing happened tonight.
Just by chance, I placed my sniper (using a small sniper) on my opponents hidden gun.
When he was cloning the gun (to put it to the side for details), my sniper flashed with a red border.
By chance I was looking at the screen so knew there was something going on there. Is this a known bug?
 

DougRim

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It is now. There are several bugs involving HIPsters. Will try to deal with all of them in next VASL update.
 

DougRim

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Having looked at this in more detail, I am not sure there is a bug here after all. As far as I can tell, if you do things to a stack containing your opponent's counters, it will flash a red border. I don't know for sure, but perhaps this is help prevent an opponent messing with a stack inappropriately.

This applies to moving your opponent's stack, or breaking one of its units. It also applies when you do something like your situation, cloning a counter, even if it is one of yours.

But it does not always apply. For example, I found that if you flip a one of your opponent's broken (but not DM) counters back to its good order side, this does not trigger the red border. Why? Does anyone know?

Do we need the red border thing at all? What is it's original purpose?
 

Rindis

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It sounds like you're describing the border that shows the last unit to move in a log. If this is in live Vassal, or as you're doing things, then I don't know what you're talking about.

But the idea is that it is possible to turn off, or not have announcements at all, for events like someone moving a unit. And there could be hordes of identical units. So Vassal puts a red border around the last thing to move on a board as a log is gone through so the person playing the log can follow what's going on. Flipping a unit isn't physically moving anything, so that doesn't generally get a border.
 

bprobst

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Having looked at this in more detail, I am not sure there is a bug here after all.
Anything that gives your opponent an indication of any sort where your HIP units are is a bug. Period. As far as your opponent is concerned, your HIP units should not exist for any purpose whatsoever.

So in this particular case, whatever the action was that triggered the "red border" should have an exemption on it if HIP units are involved.

If that means dumping the red border altogether, personally I'd be OK with it.
 

Vinnie

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It was live vasl play. Sheer chance I was looking at that part of the map at the time.
 

Rindis

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Just re-read your description Vinnie...

Okay, so manipulating a stack should cause a red outline for anyone who isn't doing that (that's not 'ownership', anything you do will still cause you to see it on a log playback; I was thinking that doesn't happen live, but this almost has to be that, so I'm wrong).

I'm pretty sure that manipulating a Hidden stack will not show up for anyone who can't see it. But this was a combined Hidden/visible stack, so when the Hidden part was changed, the outlining showed up for the visible portion.

It used to be that when you moved a unit onto a location that had the enemy's HIP units in it, the other player would have the annoying situation of two different stacks; and he'd have to move something out and back to get one stack he could work with. I noticed that seems to have been fixed a little bit ago. This bug is probably falling out of that fix.
 

Vinnie

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I know he was being lazy, cloning the gun to place on the side for details rather than getting a new one out but I wonder if the same would happen when asking for the info on it (Ctrl-I)?
I'll try it out tonight.
Obviously this is very rare but if we can chase it down the better.
In our game, my opponent fired the weapon the first chance he got but if it had been further back it would put me in a uncomfortable position. Do I use the information or not? Since it was my sniper counter, this could easily happen in the heart of a defence well beyond the possibility of the hidden fun having a shot.
 
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