VASSAL advice

[spelk]

Is it easy to set up VASSAL with a board and some chits, just so you can prototype/test a board game?

I've got a board game I'm play-testing, but I'm having issues rustling up the board and counters, and finding the space to run through the play rules with it. What I really want is a simple setup whereby I can just plop the board down, cut out the chits, and move them about on the board on the screen, perhaps do some d6 rolling.. and thats about it. Rule management would be all my own doing. It's a solitaire game BTW.

I've tried doing this in Fantasy Grounds, and Battlegrounds clients without much success. Is there an easy way to do this in Vassal, bearning in mind I have absolutely ZERO experience of it? Any other options?

My last resort is to put it all into PAINT.NET and use the layers there to move chits about, however, there are quite a number of chits, not sure the software could deal with me shuffling stuff about without too much of a kerfuffle.

Any advice would be most appreciated. I simply want a board and counters setup to trial a boardgame. Nothing complicated.

[Bison]

Bartheart is the the vassal guru.  He's made a number of vassal game conversions.

[Barthheart]

Spelk, do you have the art in electronic form for the pieces and map?

If yes it's realatively easy to do what you want. There's a pretty good wlk through available to create a module here:

http://www.vassalengine.org/wiki/Tutorials

If you are not up to it let me know and maybe I can bash something out for you.

[GJK]

VASSAL becomes easier the more you poke around with it.  The initial learning curve can be a bit steep.  ZunTzu on the otherhand is quite easy.  You just copy and paste the example XML code from the website and swap out your names and numbers and its ready.  The most difficult part is getting the x,y coordinates from your countersheets but I've written a web based app that will sort that out for you. 

What takes me a couple of hours to do in VASSAL, I can do in 20 minutes in ZunTzu.  VASSAL has distinct advantages but if you just need to quickly piece together an electronic playtest kit, I'd do it in ZunTzu personally.   

[spelk]

Oh thanks for the advice folks, I've just put about 15 minutes in and have approximately something to playtest with in ZunTzu. only tested it on about 12 counters, but it seems to work pretty smoothly once you figure out the XML definitions.

Now I can tweak it some more, and finally get some playtesting done, without having to go through printing and mounting and chopping on a guillotine.

Fairly straightforward to come up with a basic board and chit setup.
http://www.zuntzu.com/create_gamebox.htm

[GJK]

Yeah, ZunTzu is pretty quick and easy to get a gamebox put together for.

If you have a larger set of countersheets and you want to get the x,y coordinates for ZunTzu, message me.  I can upload you images to this directory and my little web app will write the XML code for you.

Example can be done here: http://garykrockover.com/zuntzu/getxy.html

[spelk]

Thanks for the offer GJK, much appreciated. I think the stuff I've got is part of an NDA at the moment, so I probably couldn't pass the artwork on - but it would be good practice for me to spend time chopping the chits up anyway.

It's not a game box I would release to the public anyway, I'm just playtesting the thing - and can't be bothered to do all the printing, mounting and cutting.

You must use some pretty snazzy algorithm to detect counter image edges to do the cutting programmatically!

[GJK]

Its been so long since I wrote that so I would have to look at the source code.  It obviously uses JavaScript for the client side code and then I use a small database application that is of course server side to store the variables.  I may of just grabbed a simple script that locates the x,y values from wherever you click the mouse and then modified it to fit my needs come to think about it.  I also have a script to run alongside this app that will magnify a small window around the mouse and the mouse pointer becomes a large "crosshair" not unlike what you see in AUTOCAD so you can get really exact with your measurements but that's not uploaded to the server.

Well, glad that ZT worked for you at any rate.