Creating a checkerboard battlefield

[Tigt]

Hello, I'm creating a CCG that uses a battlefield delineated into squares, where the cards move around on, much like a chessboard.

I messed with the Gridsize definition for the plugin info, but the game will allow multiple cards on each square (say attaching a card to another), so fine control of movement is important.

So I'm now attempting to just have the background image of the table provide the gridlines, but given how the table scales depending on the user's screen and how they adjust the panels, I'm unsure how to go about doing that. Do you have some insight on how to best gridify the table, Trevor?

The initial test is 10x10 rectangular cells, but it would be ideal if users could swap out battlefields by using the Lackey appearance options.

[Trevor]

The table should show the piece on the right tiled in a way consistent to all viewers.

[Tigt]

Does that work for non-symmetrical playing fields?

[Trevor]

It should.

Note that there is an option in the appearance preferences to make your table playmat always face you, or always face the person in seat 1. (There is also the option at the plugin level to have all players on the same side of the table.)

If you have your own playmat, you might want it to always face you so you don't see it upside-down if you are not on the side of seat 1. If you have a playmat that you want to be more realistic (i.e., everyone sees it in the same place, regardless of where you're sitting), you would want to have that always face the person in seat 1.

[Tigt]

Man, you've got this on lock. One last question: is there a way to easily share playmats/battlefields via Lackey, like the soundshare feature or similar?

[Trevor]

Man, you've got this on lock. One last question: is there a way to easily share playmats/battlefields via Lackey, like the soundshare feature or similar?

/playmatsync
or just
/ps
for short.

[Tigt]

Alright, I lied about that being the last question. Is there a way to force the text label of a card to appear over it, even if there is an image in place? I'm using random images just for easy identification purposes, but in early playtesting the card text changes so often I'd rather just have the Lackey text info float over the zoomed-in card than making those changes in both the file and an image editor every time.

[Gordon228]

there should be an option in the appearance section of preferences i think. Not sure if that is the right place where it would be but i do know it's in preferences.

[Trundel]

(There is also the option at the plugin level to have all players on the same side of the table.)

I've been looking without success for this option in the plugin tutorial. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I've been forcing my son to view the map upside down!

[Tigt]

Trundel's question was answered in another thread, but just for any future readers wondering the same question, the definition he wanted is:

Code Select Expand

<definition><kind>SITONSAMESIDE</kind><value>yes</value></definition>

I figured I'd use this topic again instead of making a new one, so pardon me if that's a bad idea.

Orientation of cards has ended up being an important part of gameplay, and I was wondering if there was some way to make a card rotate +90 degrees, instead of having four different buttons that set it to 0/90/180/270 orientations. Is there some sort of definition list that comes with the LackeyCCG installation? It seems this forum uncovers loads of features that aren't listed on the main site tutorials.

As a result of this, the double click function to tap/untap isn't quite as useful as it is with normal games. Is there a way to remap that? Say, to add 90 degrees every double click, or maybe to grey out/un-grey out the card to mark it as "exhausted?"

[Trevor]

Currently if a plugin defines a 90, a 180, or a 270, it changes what a double click does. If I recall, a double-click cycles through all of the rotations that a plugin defines. So if 2 are defined, its a toggle. At present, you can't explicitly define a double-click to be associated with a certain function, but that's a good idea to implement.

[Tigt]

Gotcha. I can get the behavior we want by defining all four states, then.

Is there an escape character for the plugininfo files? Or should I use alt codes?

[Trevor]

Gotcha. I can get the behavior we want by defining all four states, then.

Is there an escape character for the plugininfo files? Or should I use alt codes?

If you just have 0 and 180, it will toggle between those.

Not sure what you mean by escape characters and alt codes.

[Tigt]

I'm trying to save space by using ^ > v < for the buttons that would change card orientation, but using < and > will usually cause parsing errors in varieties of xml, which I assume plugininfo counts as.

EDIT: As it turns out, < and > do not cause parsing errors in plugininfo.txt.

[Tigt]

In this endeavor I found that Lackey trying to load plugininfo.txt when the txt file is encoded as UTF will cause it to choke and die.

You probably have no intention of supporting unusual symbols beyond the ASCII standard, but I thought you might want to know in order to have it show an error message instead of just crashing.