“Talon Tuesdays” is an article series appearing on InsideGMT periodically on Tuesdays.  It features articles from the Talon development team regarding the game’s design, development and upcoming release.

Issue #26: Vassal Module

It’s finally here!

The Vassal module for Talon!

Behold:

http://www.vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Talon

Why am I so pumped for this module?

For the entire production cycle of Talon, I was convinced that it would be impossible to make a module in Vassal for Talon. This was mostly due to the fact that so much information is tracked directly on the ship counter AND that information is generally marked off quickly with a dry erase marker. Vassal tends to favor more traditional games that use counters to track the status of a unit and has no function for writing on a counter per- se.

I’m not bad at Vassal. The Space Empires module has some decent automation but it is a bit clunky, although that comes with the territory in Vassal. However, the lead designer for the module, Stefano Tine’ has exceeded my ability in every regard.

It started when he found a way to use layers to mimic marking pips for a ship’s shields, hull and weapons.  It worked, it just necessitated making a separate layer image for EVERY SINGLE pip level for every single bar/shield on a given ship.

Stefano could have stopped there. We would have had a working module with ships that tracked info like the dry erase version. But he was not satisfied.

In addition to loads of polish, making sure the different critical and shield reinforcement markers didn’t cover up information too badly, Stefano added automation and player quality of life features to just about every aspect of the module. This was a huge undertaking and involved a LOT more work than your average Vassal module.

He also added the ability for markers, like the Missiles or Turn Radii to be tracked as ship dependencies. So if the board gets cluttered, you can just click highlight dependencies and see whose Turn Radius marker that is.

Destroyed ships are sent to a Casualty window where players can quickly calculate their degree of victory just by dragging ships into a pile.

The icing on the cake, as it were, is Empire War.  I was debating even including this as a feature in the module. Stefano managed to craft a fully functional Empire War system that tracks purchases, ship status/health and automates the temporary repairs that occur after battles.  It works like a dream, I could really see myself running a campaign and using this to track it.

That’s not to say the module doesn’t have weaknesses. However, they aren’t Stefano’s fault. Vassal is a clunky program and, in making the module, we’re tricking it into doing a lot of things for us. This leads to Vassal taking its sweet time during the initial loading of scenarios. Users of my Space Empires module will be all too familiar with this. When you load a scenario in the module, it may be ~3 minutes before it finishes loading. Maybe it’ll give you some nostalgia for playing old 90s PC games. If not, go make a sandwich.

One important note: We do recommend that you upgrade your Vassal version to 3.2.16 as soon as it becomes available from VassalEngine.org. There are some VLOG related issues that are being patched in the main Vassal engine.

That said, it really runs well and Stefano went out of his way to optimize the load times. For instance: In order to view the base ship counter if there are a bunch of critical/shield reinforcement counters on it, we have Vassal display semi-transparent versions of the counters when the ship is selected. Rather than having a semi-transparent version of EVERY info counter in every orientation, he had the idea to make generic ones as placeholders. This way you can still see what kind of counter (green would be Shield Reinforcement) but without the memory bloat of having all the extra art files loaded.

But don’t take my word for it, go check it out for yourself.

The module is REALLY self-explanatory and user friendly, but if you’re skittish about trying it out, check out these tutorial videos I put together to get you started:

Vassal Basics:

Empire War in Vassal:

If you see Stefano online, tell him “Thank you!”.

Previous Article in the Series: Talon Tuesday Issue #25: Talon Puzzle 3

Next Article in the Series: Talon Tuesday Issue #27: Talon Puzzle 3 – Solution

Author: Bob Seifert