New program to help set up VASL scenarios

Pacman Ghost · Mar 1, 2021

holdit said:
Small bug report - in the German capabilities snippet, Massacre ability and Squad Assault Fire should really be intended beneath an "SS" heading, otherwise they look as if they're generic German abilities. The "Disrupt...vs Russians" bit should really be on a separate line and indented too.

Thanks. I'll include a fix for this in the next release.

If you want to fix it now, save this file on top of the existing one (in the data/default-template-pack/ directory):

Rocket-Man · Mar 1, 2021

Pacman Ghost said:
The snippets you posted work correctly for me. Did you create these labels manually? I'm thinking you maybe chose the bold labels from the palette (marked in red), which I think always bolds everything. I always use the non-bold version (marked in green).
View attachment 16926

I used the first label, that was the problem.

The bold tag doesn't work with either of the first two or the last two labels . The text is never bolded on the first two and it is always bolded on the last two, regardless of the bold tags.

It does work with the middle two labels.

Thanks for the help.

Rocket-Man · Mar 1, 2021

For the Count Remaining of Panzerfausts and Tank Hunter Heroes snippets, there should be a way to generate a header stating what the numbers are. A button could be added on the Count Remaining tab to generate a snippet that says "Panzerfausts Remaining" and "Tank Hunter Heroes Remaining" that can be placed on a label above the numbers in VASL.

Below is the label I created for Panzerfausts Remaining.

<html>

<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<style>
body {

}

p { margin-top: 5px ; margin-bottom: 0 ; }

ul { margin: 0 ; padding: 0 0 0 10px ; }

td { margin: 0 ; padding: 0 ; }
td.c { text-align: center ; }
td.l { text-align: left ; }
td.r { text-align: right ; }

sup { font-size: 75% ; }
sub { vertical-align: sub ; font-size: 80% ; line-height: 0.5em ; }

.exc { font-style: italic ; color: #404040 ; }

</style>
</head>

<table>

<tr>
<td style="
background: #d3edfc ;
border-bottom: 1px solid #91cdf5 ;
padding: 2px 5px ;
font-weight: bold ;

">

Panzerfausts Remaining<br>
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Ctrl-L to modify

</table>

</html>

Pacman Ghost · Mar 1, 2021

Rocket-Man said:
For the Count Remaining of Panzerfausts and Tank Hunter Heroes snippets, there should be a way to generate a header stating what the numbers are.

These labels are this way because I like to put them on top of a counter:

The templates have been written in such a way that it's easy to change the value:

select the counter
press Ctrl-L
press right arrow

and the cursor will be where it needs to be.

But if you prefer it another way, that's OK, vasl-templates was designed to be extensible. Look in the data/default-template-pack/extras/ directory for examples, add your own file there, and it will appear in the Extras tab the next time you restart the program. There are some special comments you can add that will show up in the UI, but it's not essential.

RickF · Mar 5, 2021

I'm having some trouble getting the .exe file to run regardless of VASL mod or VASSAL version. Either the program fails to respond or, if I run it from a desktop shortcut, I get this error message:

When I look at the config file, I see this:

Anyone else having this issue? Any solutions?

Thanks!

Pacman Ghost · Mar 5, 2021

RickF said:
Either the program fails to respond

What exactly is happening? Does the main window open but nothing shows, or do you not even get that? Note that the program can be quite slow to start.

Have you got something else running on port 5010? The program should show a proper error message in this case, but you could try changing this.

Also, look in C:\Users\YOUR-NAME\, and there should be a file called vasl-templates.log that should have more information.

RickF · Mar 5, 2021

From .log file:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "vasl_templates\main.py", line 72, in main
File "vasl_templates\main.py", line 146, in _do_main
KeyError: 'FLASK_PORT_NO'

And when we say "quite slow to start" that's not like 15 minutes, right? I do get the program window, but nothing showing.

Pacman Ghost · Mar 5, 2021

RickF said:
And when we say "quite slow to start" that's not like 15 minutes, right?

No, maybe 10 seconds.

The error log suggests that it's not finding the config file. You just unpacked the ZIP and ran the EXE, right? You didn't do anything with the files, move them around or rename or edit them?

What version of Windows and vasl-templates?

RickF · Mar 6, 2021

Windows 10 and vasl-templates 1.4a

And yes, just unpacked the zip in a folder and ran .exe.

Pacman Ghost · Mar 6, 2021

I'm baffled as to what this could be.

try unpacking and running it from a different directory
try 1.5.beta1
try temporarily disabling your virus checker
try it on another machine

If you know how, md5sum the ZIP file you downloaded.

One more thing to try. Create a file somewhere that looks like this:

Code:

[Debug]
FLASK_PORT_NO = 5010

Then run the program like this:

Code:

vasl-templates.exe --debug ...

where ... is the full path to the file you created.

Pacman Ghost · Mar 6, 2021

Pacman Ghost said:
The error log suggests that it's not finding the config file.

When you unpacked the ZIP file, did you preserve the directory structure? In the directory that has the vasl-templates.exe file, there should be sub-directories called config, data and examples. Or do you just have a big mess of files?

holdit · Mar 6, 2021

Pacman Ghost said:
Thanks. I'll include a fix for this in the next release.

If you want to fix it now, save this file on top of the existing one (in the data/default-template-pack/ directory):

Perfect, thanks.

Rocket-Man · Mar 10, 2021

The notes for the Poles have the Commonwealth color, but still have the bottom border in the allied minor color.

Pacman Ghost · Mar 10, 2021

Rocket-Man said:
The notes for the Poles have the Commonwealth color, but still have the bottom border in the allied minor color.

I can't remember how I decided on the colors, but they are defined in nationalities.json, so you can have a play with them there if you want. What do you think they should be?

Rocket-Man · Mar 10, 2021

Pacman Ghost said:
I can't remember how I decided on the colors, but they are defined in nationalities.json, so you can have a play with them there if you want. What do you think they should be?

I figured the Polish colors should be the same as every other allied minor. The Polish colors are:

"polish": {

"display_name": "Polish",

"ob_colors": [ "#ecd8b0","#e8cfa4", "#84e8c2" ],

"type": "allied-minor"

},

And all the other Allied Minor colors are (using the Belgians as an example):

"belgian": {

"display_name": "Belgian",

"ob_colors": [ "#a3ecd1","#82e3bd", "#61d8a6" ],

"type": "allied-minor"

},

These colors are shown below:

I fixed my nationalities.json to have the Polish colors match the rest of the Allied Minors.

Pacman Ghost · Mar 10, 2021

Rocket-Man said:
I figured the Polish colors should be the same as every other allied minor.

Aha! I remembered why I picked these colors: Poland In Flames has two-tone counters for the Polish:

But that file is part of the template pack so that it can be customized (you can even add new nationalities to the program), so if you prefer it the standard Allied Minor colors, you can leave it the way it is (or create a new template pack).

Rocket-Man · Mar 14, 2021

Pacman Ghost said:
But that file is part of the template pack so that it can be customized (you can even add new nationalities to the program), so if you prefer it the standard Allied Minor colors, you can leave it the way it is (or create a new template pack).

I played around with making a custom template for the Waffen SS, with black backgrounds and white text to match the VASL Waffen SS counters, but couldn't figure out how to change the text color for the html snippets. It seems like the text color is pulled from common.css and that color (#404040) is used for all the text in the html snippets, so it isn't possible to have a separate font color for a nationality.

I also couldn't figure out where the program grabs the images for the symbols of each nationality in the Player boxes.

Any advice on how to make that work? (short of what I have been doing which is just editing the background and border-bottom colors plus adding a color parameter to the German html snippets)

Pacman Ghost · Mar 14, 2021

Rocket-Man said:
It seems like the text color is pulled from common.css and that color (#404040) is used for all the text in the html snippets, so it isn't possible to have a separate font color for a nationality.

The colors in nationalities.json control only the borders and backgrounds, but snippets get passed the player nationality, so you could do something like this:

Code:

 color: {%if PLAYER_NAME == "Waffen SS" %} #000 {%else%} #404040 {%endif%} ;

BTW, the #404040 you referred to, I think you're looking at the .exc rule, which is for "[EXC: ...]" content. I don't think I explicitly set a text color anywhere, so it'll just default to black.

Rocket-Man said:
I also couldn't figure out where the program grabs the images for the symbols of each nationality in the Player boxes.

It gets a file based on the nationalitiy's ID (as defined in nationalities.json) from the flags/ directory (e.g. german.png). However, this only applies if you're running from source (or Docker), it's not available if you're running the Windows EXE. But, you can add a "flag" parameter to the nationality's entry in nationalities.json, that can be a file path or URL, and the program will use that instead.

Rocket-Man · Mar 14, 2021

Thanks for the help Pacman Ghost.

The text color code worked and it generates the proper html snippet, but the Windows EXE still displays the text color as dark grey (#404040 I think) which makes it hard to read in the program. Not a deal breaker though.

There is no "flags/" directory that I can find, but the Windows EXE is still getting the images from somewhere to display in the player boxes and the player tabs. Are those images embedded in the exe?

Pacman Ghost · Mar 14, 2021

Rocket-Man said:
There is no "flags/" directory that I can find, but the Windows EXE is still getting the images from somewhere to display in the player boxes and the player tabs. Are those images embedded in the exe?

vasl-templates.exe is a self-extracting EXE, and unpacks itself to somewhere like C:\Users\YOUR-NAME\AppData\Local\Temp\_MEI... and runs from there. You'll find the flag images inside there, but don't bother trying to put a new flag there, since the EXE will unpack itself to somewhere new the next time it runs.

Add a "flag" parameter to the nationalities.json file, pointing to a new flag image, and it should work.

New program to help set up VASL scenarios

Senior Member

Space is only 100Km up

Space is only 100Km up

Senior Member

Recruit

Senior Member

Recruit

Senior Member

Recruit

Senior Member

Senior Member

Senior Member

Space is only 100Km up

Senior Member

Space is only 100Km up

Senior Member

Space is only 100Km up

Senior Member

Space is only 100Km up

Senior Member