American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

The snapshot feature is based on what is currently being displayed. Its like asking a toaster to bake a potato ROFL

No program that I know of takes a file you are viewing and renders it as a bitmap. If you find that you have found the Golden Fleece and the Fountain of Youth both in one place. The Main Program is taking the file and showing you whatever your screen resolution can handle. These new super wide monitors would be great to use for making Planning Maps. Not as many sections to use ....

Unlike Steve T. I dislike the hexes turned on in the Planning Maps - looks like a beehive on the map. What I do is zoom in when I join the pieces. If you do it right the Planning Map is never off by a pixel. If it is - oh well and the large Leipzig planning map I made is meant to be viewed at a distance .... not at face to the map range

It has been nice to see the amount of work poured into the series but at some point the Design Team has to say - what dollar amount are we getting in return. Contrary to public opinion most wargamers I know DO like to keep their wives, kids and day job. Hundreds of hours have gone into the current updates and I for one am VERY THANKFUL for what we have. Any enhancement past this point is IMHO an incredible testimony to what these folks (and their families in tolerating their time away from them) have already done and I am amazed at what has been done to a program that is from 2000 and before.

So ... set your screen res. to the highest level that your monitor can handle and turn off the Auto Scroll and "roll em" - making a Planning Map takes a lot of time for the very large ones but hey, if some of you can help Steve Trauth out it sure would be nice. Not right that he has to make up all of those maps on his own. Its not hard - pull out Photoshop or a paint program that can handle the large amount of RAM it needs and presto: you are an instant celeb.

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Optional Rules I Use in WDS ACW Games:
(by column from left to right)
Column 1: All ON except for Man. Def. Fire; Column 2: All ON except for Alt Fixed Unit Rel.; Column 3: All ON except for Art.Capt. & Prop.Op.Fire

Well WDS showed with Petersburg that it can be justified to put a lot work into such an old engine. And they want to bring all the old games to the level of Petersburg.

That the snapshot feature does not work the CW way in NAP is maybe even just because of some inactive code. AFAIk the extreme FoW we now have in the CW series was there but just not active.

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Lieutenant General Christian Hecht
Commander I Corps, Army of the Potomac

"Where to stop? I don't know. At Hell, I expect."

This is a reply to Bill's post.

Not sure you understand Bill, but the fantasy program you speak about appears to be in the ACW code which takes a snap shot not just of what is on the screen but of the entire map that is presently in use in the scenario you have open AND converts it to a BMP file. This feature works on all the ACW titles I have.

I hear you loud and clear as to the limits regarding the economics modifying games. In this case the code appears to exist and given the similarity of the game engines for the NAP and ACW prompted my question of whether it would be a big deal to add the ACW snapshot code to the NAP series. Rich suggested I send a note to JTS support with this question and I will do that.

All of that said I am very impressed with the graphic upgrades that are being made in the JTS games and somewhat awed actually that JTS is not charging anything to existing owners of the games for those upgrades.

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Walter A. Dortch
Commanding -/4/V AotP
UA Cabinet Secretary
UA Operations Officer
UA Wolverine Team Leader

Well Walt, look on the bright side - this is now going to become an engine change request for at least one series (probably 2 now that I think of it) -as I thought that it worked the same in all series -and I like the CWB style a lot better (put another way it saves me a lot of work elsewhere). I thank you for bringing it up.

Bill brought up an interesting point, about zooming out an image, and I know David Freer has saved his images in pdf format -that might work as well.

Considering so much of the terrain is conforming to a hexside, or is hexshaped, it seemed logical to show people just having a look that these are hex and counter boardgames -if you expect more (like a real time strategy game coming in to these, then you are going to maybe leave feeling disappointed, I mean who knows, because the 8 bit style doesn't do much for me, so it was mostly about getting something out there and done at the time.

Maybe 3d mode will be a different animal -as to me those are more about demonstrating a miniatures looks anyways -and miniatures' tables are generally hexless.

At the moment once I get connected to my regular ISP things will become more than a discussion (on my end). I do need to come up with a way to re-jig the presentation on the site and fit that around some other duties I have taken on. I also have to remember to fix a graphics problem for a project too (only wrote because I just remembered it

I'm not sure at what point the CWB got changed, but I think it had to have been before the coding was handed over to WDS, if for no other reason than it is in titles that I am pretty certain they haven't yet changed anything in. I nearly wrote Bill's post about a week ago when I first added something to this thread, but am glad that I checked the feature out; I think I sort of alluded to it earlier -but I took for granted that it worked the same in all of the titles.

This is bad English on my part, but don't not send an email to support because of this - but I have brought this up on development boards (am editing this in about 40 minutes after my original post). I suspect it might be a tweak of the existing code just to show more when the snapshot command is made. Entire map vs entire current view -something like that -but not actually seeing the code, that is basically an educated guess.

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~Retired~

All right!

This is great news and thank you for taking this up with the Development Board!

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Walter A. Dortch
Commanding -/4/V AotP
UA Cabinet Secretary
UA Operations Officer
UA Wolverine Team Leader