If you want to remove certain counter types from ever appearing in the mix of Deep Space Counters you can right click a stack, select them and remove them manually. Larger maps (like the 4 player galactic or 4 board map) takes around 2-3 minutes to load on an older laptop of mine but the regular sized maps all take less than 30 seconds. The board loading time is also much better. So, if you are player 1 and want to be Red change player 1 to red here and the Player 1 counters will be loaded on (say) the 2 player map as red. This does mean you have to pick a color when you first create/join a game and also set which player is which here.
There you can change what color is loaded. The map loader picks the player colors based on what is set in the Setup Options and Space Counters menu (menu button can be seen to the upper right of this paragraph). This feature took the longest to build and Iâll discuss this more in the Vassal development section below. Same goes for many of the solo and co-op maps. For instance, if you want to do a Galactic Capital based scenario, just put that marker in the center of the map after loading the 2 Player map. The good thing about these maps is many other scenarios can be built from them. I tried to pick the most common layouts first. By basic I mean things like the 2 player normal sized map or the 4 player map. Now basic scenarios (not all of them yet) can be loaded from a drop down menu. The original module has a pretty poor feature for loading scenarios. Here Iâll walk through some other changes for reference, but I probably ought to make a formal video/manual at some point. Youâll find a quick start guide in the module itself that can explain many basic features to get you started.
Capacity for Epic (double) and Galactic (quadruple) maps. Automated Scenario Loading and Board Randomization. Then Iâd like to walk through some of the development aspects for other Vassal developersâgood resources for Vassal developers are hard to come by so I hope this post can help some folks out. What Iâd like to do here is first explain some of the new Vassal features for users. I developed something to manage board randomization that I donât think any Vassal developer has done before (not to toot my own horn but Iâm pretty happy with what I built). Redesigning the map alone was probably 50% of the work for this. It was really hard to work on if I couldnât find 2-3 solid consecutive hours to work. This delay had way more to do with life getting in the way of Vassal development than the module itself, although Iâve still probably put a few hundred hours into it. Over 3 years later the module is finally finished. I wanted to start fresh to make sure things ran as optimally as possible. No framework from the original module was to be used. This was a complete rebuild of the module from the ground up. But Iâve felt these features were both very necessary if you were going to play Space Empires on a computer.īefore Replicators was published, I began working on the revised v3.0 Vassal module. Vassal was never really designed to be able to do some of the things Iâve made it do both in that module and the new v3.0 moduleâthings like randomizing the map or automating the production sheets. On top of that, sometimes the map randomizer would goof up and put 2 counters in one hex. The module was not only using a lot of unnecessary resources to load images that were outdated, but there were a lot of counters that didnât need to exist that also took up memory and processing time for some actions.Ĭase in point, if youâve used it, is how long it takes to load up and randomize the map. This led to a very bogged down Vassal module. Then when SE: Close Encounters came out I had to tack on a number of new features. By the time I was working on it some of the ground work was already in place, but many things had to be revamped. It was the product of a lot of work but also of several different people. 
The original Vassal module for Space Empires 4x was made in 2011â¦almost 9 years ago.
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