FlatPackFred
Member
Wouldl it be possible to develop an extension that highlights unpossessed support weapons?
Yeah, the logic seems to get complicated fast to cover all cases. Unpossessed on an upper level, outside a foxhole, various info counters folks might move to the bottom (SMOKE, acquisition, etc). Not insurmountable, but a fair bit of thought to improve upon a quick and dirty first pass! The existing broken and malfunctioned selection is much easier.Possible, yes.
The quick and dirty way to do it would be to loop through every "stack" (even a single counter on its own is a stack) and check the bottom counter. If it is a SW then it is unpossessed. I am not sure this would work in all situations.
Yes, in a way. The old extension was useful in large CGs.The broken/malfed tool is now part of VASL. Click the malfed fun on the toolbar. Works same as Sniper Finder.
I don't disagree that the old list had its uses, however, in large CGs I want to see the board anyway so I can determine which broken dudes I deem more important to self-rally. And, given I want to communicate where I am performing an action to my opponent, I am already clicking on the hex to let them know where I am doing the action.Yes, in a way. The old extension was useful in large CGs.
You could click down along the list and deal with the rallies/repairs
In the current mode as part of VASL, you have to visually examine the playing area and scroll around to get to the game pieces in question.
von Marwitz
When I posted the original question I was just thinking of checking whether the bottom counter was a SW - quick and dirty. A slightly better approach would be if a SW was beneath the first infantry counter in the stack. Still wouldn't work for all cases - 1st floor etc - but better.There is no logical association in VASL between a unit counter and any SW counter it possess. With the new and improved counter traits in VASSAL there may now be a way to do that. Worth checking. Checking for the absence of such an association might be a way to handle this.
I agree. If we are going to do this, best to do it properly and in a way that will also enable other features.I do like the idea of linking SW with infantry units - so long as it doesn't make the UX too fiddly. That would provide the dataset needed to manage unpossessed SW and quite a lot of other pretty cool features.
Let me know if I can help
I agree. Even if it isn't perfect I think something that just parses the stack is going to help more people than the burden of associating (i.e. linking) SW with various units.To be honest if it was me I would just write the code so that SW are associated with an infantry unit in the same way as in the rules. In other words the user wouldn't have to do anything. It would mean that the code would have to understand which counters are used to indicate separate locations within a hex (e.g. Cellar/Ist Floor/Trench)- but there can't be too many of them. Then it would be straight forward to find any unpossessed SW.
Just wondering what else SW possession would help with? The additional GUI controls needed to be able to track infantry MF make that quite unattractive. Maybe an indication of the number of PP that a unit is in possession of?
On the other hand I don't think that the above coding would be too difficult- and a button highlighting unpossessed equipment would be really helpful. I know that's what everyone says ...
Here is a situation, in which this can happen.Your approach makes sense to me as I can't think of any situation when a 5/8" counter would come between an infantry unit and the SW it possesses. So it would be a case of parsing the 1/2" counters between any 5/8" counters and highlighting any hexes where there is a SW below the 1st infantry unit